As mentioned in our previous blog posting, we are moving our datacenter to the US; this means we now have space on a server in the US and a server in London, ensuring that our clients in both countries get the fastest possible response for their websites.

Our server uptimes are still exemplary, as we show on our Server Status page (http://www.kpdirection.com/serverstatus.php). We're proud of this, and our monitoring is done in real-time by a third party company to prove that we're not just making the figures up.

As you can see from the uptime graph, both servers are showing an uptime more than 99.99% for 2008. And, of course, we *don't* guarantee this! Why? Because we live in the real world. Our aim is to make sure that your websites and email are available as much as possible, but for us to guarantee this would involve paying for insurance against downtime. This cost would have to be passed onto our clients - who would therefore end up paying more for the same level of service, and subsidizing a guarantee that is virtually worthless because of the myriad of aspects that can stop a particular user accessing a website.

So, what if you need a guarantee? Call us to discuss a dedicated server for your company.

How much will hosting cost? Less than you expect for business class hosting, but we charge more than companies like GoDaddy and Hostgator, and we don't offer unlimited bandwidth and diskspace. This is because we are a business that wants to understand your business and offer you the services you need. We deliberately don't overload our servers with as many websites as we can fit on them, and we keep our customer base down to a manageable level; we know all our clients by name, and they know they can ring us at any time day or night and we'll sort their web hosting problems for them. We run our business for businesses!

Labels: Business, Clients, IT Support, Web Design

Maintenance and upgrades on Swift are now complete.

The next planned change is this weekend, 14/15 June, when we'll be moving to a new datacentre in the US. This is a slightly more involved change, but we'll try to ensure that downtime is kept to a minimum.

Just a quick note to say that our servers will be upgraded on Tuesday 10th June 2008 (for Swift) and Wednesday 11th June 2008 (for Mentor). This is the first scheduled outage for both servers since we started offering web hosting to our clients, and our published statistics (http://www.kpdirection.com/serverstatus.php) - monitored by a third party company - show how reliable our business-class hosting is.

This upgrade is for a major version change of PHP, seeing us remove PHP4 from the servers and upgrade to the latest PHP5 version. We will also roll out other minor version upgrades of various system and service packages at the same time as this maintenance for PHP. Finally the server will be rebooted towards the end of the maintenance window to boot to a new kernel version and run any required disk check (FSCK).

All upgrades will commence at 10PM UK Time (3pm MT). We anticipate completing the maintenance prior to 7AM (UK Time) (Midnight MT) the following morning.

During the maintenance window the control panel will be unavailable, all other services remaining online and functional including your websites and email services. Towards the end of the maintenance window there will be approx 2 minutes of downtime as we reboot the server.

Labels: Business, Clients, Development, IT Support, PHP

In our opinion, website development isn't quite a professional industry. There are pockets of professionalism, but certainly on the Small/Medium Business side there is certainly a high proportion of 'Nephews' (as in, "My Nephew does computers at school, so he's doing our website for us"... really? Well, that's the sort of client KP Direction would rather not have anyway!).

One of the aspects where an amateurish approach really shows through is in dynamic websites created with PHP - specifically, the Testing area. A web development company we know of recently told us that they'd almost finished a large scale website for a major client, and were now ready to test it - how could they show their client that they had a formal testing process in place? We fell off our chairs. What they were asking is, "How can we pretend to our client that we do something that we don't really do".

Testing a dynamic website properly is the same as any major software engineering project - and as such, it starts at the start of the project. You can test your PHP class definitions as they are written, which reduces the time required at the end of the project - at which point, testing should not pop up any major surprises. Testing properly is a career in itself, similar to Designer or Programmer.

At a simplistic level there are two ways to test a site; White Box and Black Box.

White Box testing means that a test designer (who should *not* be the programmer at this stage) is able to see the specification for the internal class definitions used in the program. He then designs a series of tests which test every possible combination of input - valid and not - to see if the program handles them correctly, returning valid results or user friendly error messages as appropriate. Remember to test *every* input field (e.g, name, address1, zip code) for No input, short input (1 character), long input (More characters than are allowed), extended character input (e.g Quotes, backslashes), invalid input (deliberately put an incorrect value in to see if the system handles the error correctly). All tests should include database accesses.

Black Box testing comes after White Box. This time a second tester does not have access to the specifications of the system. Their approach is to use the system normally and abnormally - they should use it as normal users, and document their results, but they should also try to break the system - by unscrupulous means as well as valid ones - such as xss attacks etc.

After Black Box and White Box testing, you then move to Beta test - invite certain people to just 'use' the system. If you've created and proved valid test plans already, they shouldn't be able to break it. You can do that before, during, or *instead of* (yes, I've had clients do that!) User Acceptance testing - let the client play with the system and see if it does exactly what they asked for. It's not unknown for a system to get to this stage, then the client sees what you've built, and admits that they really wanted something else...

The deliverable to the client is sight of the test plans at each stage, which shows that you're taking testing seriously. To give an idea of size, a test plan I did for a contact form (OK, a reasonable complex one which wrote the information to a database, sent emails etc) was 281 separate test cases.

As you can see, then, testing is an intrinsic aspect of web development. Odd things can still happen, and requirements can change - you can never allow for absolutely all combinations of strange user inputs - but a good testing plan shows that you care about your product.

As you may have guessed, we care. If you care as well, let us know, and lets discuss your next web site development. And if you're a developer who needs to show a client that you have a formal testing procedure in place - call us on (801) 928 6953. We can work with you to develop procedures, or you can outsource your module or system testing to us.

Labels: Business, Clients, Development, PHP, Web Design

We're always looking for the best ways to keep our computers and children secure and safe, so this morning I decided to upgrade our antivirus software. Bad move, as you will find out...

Obviously we don't want to go into too many details about our network security, but at a high level, we run the following software;

MailFoundry - runs on our mail servers to reduce the amount of spam we get - we see about two or three a day now (we supply access to this free to all our hosting clients as well)
cloudmark desktop - puts the final clean and polish on spam - with this in place, we reduce spam to essentially zero, and more importantly, we don't see any false positives (valid emails marked as spam)
AVG Security Suite - Provides anti virus, firewall, antispyware, anti-rootkit... all you need to surf without fear
NetNanny - Stops access to inappropriate content and websites - of which there are more and more these days. We *know* that we and our children can surf without fear of accidentally accessing adult websites - can you say the same?

Anyway, back to the story. I upgraded to AVG Internet Security version 8; everything seemed to go OK, until I tried to access the internet. No go. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Both Mozilla and Internet Explorer just sat there waiting, and wouldn't show me any web content. Usually when this happens, NetNanny is sitting underneath another window, waiting for my input. But not in this case - it simply wasn't listening.

A deinstall of AVG 8 followed, quickly followed by another deinstall (the first one was completely ignored by AVG, and it restarted when I rebooted the machine). Once I had it deinstalled, I searched the internet for help, but found little help except a few posts claiming the same problem, and more than one response from AVG technical saying that AVG 8 will not work with NetNanny. Fortunately, this is incorrect!

The problem, I found, was that AVG 8 has a module called 'Web Shield', which works in a very similar way to NetNanny - and the two were conflicting. Turning off webshield in AVG didn't solve the problem, but deinstalling AVG8, reinstalling it using the Custom Install option and deselecting Web Shield did the trick. OK, I may have lost a little (minor!) level of functionality, but I think we're more than covered in that aspect.

A happy ending, and now I can continue with my day - 4 hours behind!

Labels: Business, Clients, IT Support

Wow! What a trip this has been with Tabitha - our feral cat that we got over Christmas in 2007.

She has had horrible spells of colitis which means that whenever and wherever, she would leave unsavory deposits all over the house. Especially the chairs in our office and the kitchen. The feeling would scare her and she would race all over until she would lose control.

We took her to the vet and got her on a high-fiber diet (high-fibre for you UK fans) and some medicine to relax her intestines. It did the trick for awhile. But being around people would stress her out so much that it would keep coming back. That's why we put her in the small bathroom.

She stayed there for about two months with small forays out into the rest of her world. While in the bathroom, she would hide in her drawer (her safe place) and we would have to coax her out with food or soft talk. Then she would come up to us and purr like crazy as we pet her. Sometimes we were able to hold her on our lap and pet her. At first, she was so unused to purring and being touched that she would gag on her saliva. The gagging reflex went away after a couple of weeks and normal eating habits were established.

As time went on and she became familiar with the whole family petting her, we would let her out into a small area - like the hallway in front of the bathroom with all the doors to the rooms closed. There she would play with us (from a distance) and play with the other two cats. As time went on, we let her have more and more room. Now she roams the house freely.

If we have company, we put her back into the bathroom as she feels secure there. Or if she gets another bout of colitis and we can see that she is stressed. By keeping her there for a couple of days, she feels safe again and she calms down and is back to normal.

There are times she gets little frisky spells and she hides on the third stair down while I crouch down and move my hand back and forth at the edge of the second stair. Her eyes get that big, cross-eyed, huge-pupiled look and I know she wants to play. She'll try to bat at my hand, run down a step, twist around and come back for more. At first, when she would touch my hand, she would kind of freak out and quit. Now she'll bat it just fine.

She likes to sleep on a towel next to Pete while he is working on the computer. He'll pet her and then she'll groom his hand. She'll lick his fingers and bite at the tips and his nails. I claim it's his English flesh! Even the mosquitoes in Utah can't stay away from him! He is our new insect repellant - we just hang out with him on our walks and he attracts them all. I know, I know - I've deviated. Back to the story of Tabitha...

She has her safe places where we can pet her. It usually has to be on a blanket or a towel. If she knows that we want to touch her, she'll run to it, crouch down and wait to be stroked. She'll then purr. The amount of safe places increases with time.

One morning I woke up rather early, came out of the bathroom and all three cats were there with their eyes half-shut. You could just see they were thinking it was rather early to be up and about but what the heck - nice way to start the day early. I grabbed Gabriel (the perfect cat) and stroked him. I then picked up Tommy Thompson (the stinky one - that cat just does not know how to keep it clean!) and stroked him. Tabitha then allowed me to stroke her. She is very smart; she'll observe me stroking Gabriel and holding him and cooing at him and then she'll imitate his behavior. She'll actually come up to me for some petting!

This morning was a huge breakthrough. I got up early again - all the other cats were sleeping with kids so she had been alone that night. She came right up and meowed (in Tabby-Lab language that means - hey! You can touch me right now), so I stroked her. I sat down with my coffee and started to study the Bible. She hopped onto the couch and sat right next to me so I could pet her. Huge strides!

We have great hopes for this one. I believe within a year, she will be a lap cat and quite normal.

Labels: Feral Cats, Tabitha, Taming Feral Cats

After a long development (starting in September 2007), KP Direction launched a redesign of the Greyhound Gang website in February.

The challenge was to redesign a successful website whilst keeping (and hopefully increasing) the sites existing visitor numbers and Google Page Rank. A further challenge was taking another companies page designs and turning them into a website with a consistent look and feel.

The site was initially all in HTML apart from Auction software; the new site is designed entirely in PHP, using MySQL as the database.

Challenges include the bimonthly updates of auctions, contests, special offers and ad-hoc updates of news items. Many of these were done on the old site manually, which was extremely labour intensive on the Monday-evening turnarounds. The new site has a time-sensitive staging area so that these changes can be constructed days, weeks or even months in advance, and the system will automatically switch them over at the designated time.

The site has been live since the middle of February, and the visitor numbers are staying stable, with the site now back up to it's previous Page Rank level. The sites owners have a website maintenance contract with KP Direction, and we look forward to the imminent redevelopment project to integrate auction software into the look and feel of the site.

Labels: Business, Clients, Development, PHP, Web Design