September 17th, 2008
Communicate Hosting Requirements at the Outset
With most of my clients, I develop their site on my web server. We’ll go back and forth through all the iterations of changes there. When it’s complete, then I move it over to their production server. 95% of the time, this works fine. I recently came across a situation, though, where a client had their website hosted with a company that did not support MySQL (my database of choice). Since I had built a CMS for them, this was a problem.
Everything was eventually worked out, but it did require some emails and phone calls back and forth to get to a resolution. The process of moving the finished site from the development server to the production server normally takes just a few hours, but in this case it took more than a week.
In hindsight, I could have easily gotten the ball rolling on verifying that MySQL would be available at the beginning of the development process. Then these issues could have been taken care of at the same time the programming and design was happening. It just didn’t occur to me because how often do you run into a situation where a web host doesn’t have MySQL already implemented? For two years it had never been an issue, but in the past few weeks it has come up three times. Most large hosting companies provide packages with MySQL, but some of the local hosting providers here in Indianapolis don’t.
The solution to avoid this in the future is to make sure that I include in my original quote that the site will need to run on a server that has PHP and MySQL. I did this when I first started my business, but kind of got out of the habit because it just didn’t seem to be necessary. If I start applying that practice again consistently with every customer, that will get the conversation about hosting requirements started. My customers (and I) won’t have any unpleasant surprises when it comes time to go live with the site.
