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Seperation of site and office system

Posted: Sat Oct 16, 2010 2:18 am
by sunegtheoverlord
Hi guys,

Im pretty new PHP but getting to grips with some simple applications.

I'm currently working on a small back end app for a taxi company to automate their pricing structure. They are a very small business and have no budget to get new equipment or even network existing equipment. They have no backup or central server so i suggested writing this application and putting it on the web so they can access it anywhere and also backup is taken out of their hands.

My question is this.

They already own a domain name hosting their website. Is it a stupid idea for me to put their pricing system app on this domain along with their website? Obviously i will secure the information inside the application but wondered whether it would be better practice to buy a fresh domain name for this purpose?

Any advice would be great.

S

Re: Seperation of site and office system

Posted: Sat Oct 16, 2010 2:21 pm
by John Cartwright
I would probably use a subdomain for the company internal stuff, however, I would host the main site and the subdomain on different machines. You do not want a company intranet applications going down as a result of your "less important" main website.

Although realistically, you could probably get away with just hosting them on the same server (since you mentioned they are a small company, and probably low traffic).

Re: Seperation of site and office system

Posted: Sun Oct 17, 2010 12:28 pm
by twinedev
sunegtheoverlord wrote:also backup is taken out of their hands.
For business use, never assume this unless you personally know the people responsible for the backup and trust them.

I have seen a well known VPS company have all kinds of hell because a former employee left himself a way back into their network, and knowing the system, also deleted things off of the backup server. While most places would probably be pretty reliable for backups, I just won't trust anything mission critical to someone else.

Of course, from your description, it is hard to say how critical this data is to their business. Just always plan for 3 days of that data being offline in case of disaster. (I come from being involved in the limo industry, and think of in terms of systems they use that are online for reservations and such, so those go offline Friday at 2pm, you can imagine how messed up there are for the weekend with bookings ;-)

Back onto the other issue, I do agree with using a subdomain, but really depends on the setup where they have hosting at.

-Greg