WEBSITE MIGRATION PLAN
Student: Keena Alexander
Professor: Dr. Ntinglet-Davis
CIS210: Systems Analysis and Development
Date: 9/10/2016
Website Migration Plan
In today’s fast paced, latest and greatest technology world, it is the status quo that the things related to internet and information technology continually change. Also, in today’s environment, e-commerce websites work around the clock to insight steady, consistent, and supportive business from across the world. A big concern for these types of businesses is the ability to connect to customers on-demand and maintain their website successfully in a secure and robust environment, in order to protect customer sensitive information and business data. For this reason, hosting an e-commerce website internally to business networks is a great way to secure access controls. In order to manage the project project that will move the old Tony’s Chips Website from an externally hosted solution to an internal one, there are few points which need to be considered before beginning the migration.. This report describes the project outline for developing a highly available website in a secure environment which would have minimal downtime and effects to the customer. The report will suggest whether a completely new site should be designed or some changes to the existing e-commerce site would allow for the new customer interaction of purchasing products online.
Things to Consider
There are various risks that must be considered before deciding to host a website on an internal business network. The following are considerations for the Tony’s Chips project:
Cost
Security
Limitations of previously hosted website
Solution
Developing and defining an efficient way for proposed requirements and improvement of existing websites will save efforts as well as resources in terms of time, money and manpower.
This can be possible with the help of System Development Life Cycle and it is the most convenient way to do this.
Prima-facie of SDLC aims:
– To assures the release of quality systems
– To give strong management controls over the project resources
– To increase the productivity of newly developed or the updated existing product
One of the traditional and heavily used models in system development is the Waterfall Model.
Waterfall Model
In this model, each stage must be finished before the subsequent stages can commence. Although designing and developing a new system is not as easy as it looks, it is still important to establish each task independently before it can be decided how all the stages will be integrated to develop the new website.
Following are the stages of implication:
Needs Assessment
To decide whether the new website is needed or existing website needs updates
To discover the estimated cost and benefits
To discover the information used in the proposed system
Analysis
To determine what is needed and what needs to be developed
To determine the objective, content of the proposed system and features of overall website
Design
To determine how the system is to be designed and developed
To determine the principal tool suite and coding, such as; HTML, CSS, JavaScript or any other software IDE such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop used in designing of website
Construction (Coding) and Testing
To Develop and test the website
To design the test case and execute them
Launch
To upload the website to a live server with the help of tools like ftppro etc.
Maintenance
It includes repairing the system in case of some issues, upgrading the system as per the requirements.
All the required tools were previously discussed in earlier phases.
When planning to develop a new ecommerce website or changing the existing site in any terms, in order to meet the business’ growing needs, the site should experience minimally significant down-time and must be available every time. The following are the basic guidelines for performance and availability issues:
Design the Architecture for Availability
The architecture should include a number of hardware components which are mentioned below and it should be multi-tiered:
Firewalls and routers
Load balancers
Web servers/front ends
Application servers
Database servers
File servers
Storage hardware
The software system build on this architecture includes following:
• Operating system software (Recommended: Linux)
• Web/application server software (LAMP)
• Database software and applications (MySQL)
• Storage management software (backup/recovery, clustering and failover, etc.
While integrating all the mentioned components into a single module or system for creating the website, redundancy should be maintained where possible because it provides security from failure and also helps in balancing the load.
Architecture
The following architecture defined here is multi-tiered architecture, implemented in internal hosted environment which is able to fulfill the growing needs of business.
The operating system on which the site is hosted is Linux, as it is open source and no security issues or concerns are there. Bulk Support and software are available for Linux
For designing E-Commerce websites PHP and MySQL is recommended, as PHP Apache servers are freely available that runs on Linux called LAMP & its open source and also lot of readymade inbuilt templates are available in PHP which ease the work of developer. No license concerns are there.
Selection of Highly Available and controllable Platforms.
Critical components should be based on a robust platform which helps in optimizing the availability of the system. It should be easy to manage also.
The system should keep the downtime to the minimum. This downtime includes planned as well as unplanned failures. Basically the requirement includes:
Failures should have a high mean time in between
Recovery should be easy and fast
Admin tools should be good
Good policies should be developed for system maintenance
Online help should be accessible
Optimizing System Performance
There are a lot of factors which affects the performance of the sites like system architecture, application design, and speed of the processor. The application design must be good for high performance. The speed of the processor is another major contributor for high performance. Data and applications which are mot in much use from high time can be off-loaded from the production system to get a high performance.
Protect the Data
The website contains and creates a lot of data which is very crucial and so needs to be protected. The data proves to be an important asset for the organization. Example of the crucial data includes profile of users, web content, transaction data, etc. The organization cannot stand the loss of this data, so it should be protected from risks, failures, disasters etc.
Disaster management
If the backup plan is situated at the same place of the production system then the system cannot be considered fully secure from disaster because the localized disaster can harm the system. So securing the data as well as the backup plan are the important element of the disaster recovery plan. There are many techniques available for securing the data from disasters. All these techniques depends upon the user’s priority like the recovery time
• Off-site backups:
This is the simplest plan, in which off-site copies of backup are created. If the main site is not accessible, the back-up data from off-sites can be used on a different server to restart the services.
• Off-site replication:
If the system needs very fast recovery then it would be better to replicate the critical data on an off-site location.
Protecting Applications
The availability of the website depends upon many things like availability of the constituents. So it is important to protect all the components of the system. Clustering software is the best approach for this because it balances the hardware redundancy so that failover can be easily overcome. Various clustering techniques are available depending upon the simultaneous accessibility of the data.
Change Plan
As the requirements continually change according to the current business needs, so the system should be developed in such an environment which helps in easy and fast adaptation to the changes. New applications can be easily integrated with this; also the workflow can be changed easily.
This design paper has described how a website can be available 24 hours around a clock and other guiding principles that meets the growing needs of business. Following this plan makes website and hosting infrastructure dynamic, which will continue fulfilling the needs of growing business in future also.
Analyzing alternatives for self-hosting the site
Alternatives
Shared hosting
In this the client’s website is on the same server
Dedicated hosting
A dedicated server is available for the client application
Co-location
A physical space is rented for the client’s application.
It is important to build in redundancy where possible. Redundant equipment can provide both protection from failure and scalable processing for load peaks. For example, storage is shared between database servers; combined with a clustering/failover solution, this enables one server to take over requests for another in case of failure. Likewise, if an application server fails, the load balancers can direct requests to other servers.
Customer Ordering Use-Case
Discuss the support operations that the internally hosted Website will require after implementation.
Following are the various support operations:
Creating and managing the user accounts
System maintenance
Checking whether the devices are operating properly
Fast recovering of the components
Thoroughly monitoring the performance of the system
Creating file systems as per the requirements
Installing the software
Creating backup plans
Creating recovery policies
Monitoring the network traffic
Updating the system regularly
Implementing security policies for accessing the system resources
The performance of the site can be evaluated using the below mentioned factors:
Checking the number of concurrent users
Browsers and operating system Compatibility
Connection speed
Number of concurrent transactions
Transaction speed
Popular terms used for searching across the website
Accessibility time
Visitor’s location
References:
1. Cocker, S. (n.d.). How To Handle A Website Migration From One Web Host To Another. Retrieved from http://ezinearticles.com.
2. Jones, C. (n.d.). Website Migration Handbook v2.
3. Shaheen, J. (n.d.). Managing Your Website Migration. Retrieved from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217355.
4. Siotos, M. (n.d.). Web Site Migration Guide – Tips For SEOs. Retrieved from http://www.seomoz.org.