In the early 90's, I wrote a programme which organised home deliveries
for a farmer friend of mind. It was optimised for the office staff to
take orders over the telephone, the customers being supplied with a
printed catalogue. It was written in Foxpro now sadly no longer with us.
In 2005 I wrote a website using PHP and MySQL to enable customers to
order online however the main work is still being done by the original
programme which hasn't had to change because the business hasn't changed
(apart from a few extras like emailing PDF invoices etc).
The delivery programme updated the websites product data and collected
orders via a direct connection to the MySQL database via an ODBC connection.
Since 2005 the website has been split on to two hosts, one part has the
day to day information stuff and is continually being reworked but the
original online ordering part has been left intact - until today.
The hosting company which has been taken over twice since 2005, shifted
the website to another server pretty much without warning. They claim to
have sent an email to the farmer just before Christmas, just when food
retailers are having a quiet time. The probably did but I am sure it was
full of techno gobbledy gook justifying their very steep price rise but
nothing to alert the farmer that his website was going to be smashed.
It took the best part of the day to get things running again but the
killer problem is that they are no longer going to allow direct
connection to the database anymore. After a lot of pleading we got 7
days grace and a connection from the farm will be allowed.
Clearly we have to go somewhere else. Can anybody recommend a hosting
company that will provide a direct connection to MySQL?
The "support" told me that it was a wicked thing to do a huge security
risk. Not having been involved in software for several years, I am
willing to believe that it could have become a problem, but is it such a
risk that nobody will offer direct connections. If so what are the the
mechanisms that are unsafe? Also what alternative techniques are
available to transfer data between databases.
If you are interested the site is
www.sunnyfields.co.uk Click on online
ordering to step back to 2005. It is a bit long in the tooth by today’s
standards but it was just as fast over a modem and you didn't have to
spend a lot of time scrolling.
Thanks for your attention.
Roger
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