A very frustrating few days shifting our web infrastructure around.  Frustrating and stressful like fixing a bike mid-race.

Changes are almost complete.  Worked quite hard to ensure a smooth transition,  though there have been two major incidents which really should not of happened.

One: a major changeover happened on Friday. The change was relatively smooth though a serious problem went unnoticed for 24 hours.  Online shopping checkouts failed at the point were you entered in a credit card.  Cause of the problem was a missing security/encryption library on new webserver. I noticed this on Saturday morning.  I really should of tested and noticed this prior to Friday so entirely my fault.  All web orders on Friday involving a credit card would of failed.  All the user would of seen was a blank webpage : which is not that indicative of a serious problem.

Second: on Monday our web hosting company were to implement changes to further cement in the new web site.  The task was scheduled for 1 am in the morning but did not proceed for some unknown reason.  I gave them the nod to do it during the day if it will only take a minute or two. Fairly standard request but lots went wrong.  Network access to our websites was unstable throughout the day with multiple outages and it was clear to me that the hosting company could not quickly diagnose or fix the problem.  I ended up instituting changes myself, after a crash course in networking, to bring sites back up.  Still not quite there but at least sites should be good.

A few more hurdles to get over.  Hopefully all the outages are now behind us and it is just tidy up. Moving forward, new web infrastructure should serve our growing needs for a long time to come and when it is time to once again to expand our web gear, the new layout will make future expansion simpler.

Bring on the weekend