The internet and information technology
Undeniably, the internet and information technology are volatile and highly dynamic. In the contemporary world, website, especially in e-commerce is central to in building a good business, and thus developers work tirelessly to ensure that sites are of standard quality and professional. It is the primary task of a company to ensure that its website is robust and highly secure from malicious acts such as hacking and spoofing. To make ecommerce more secure, organizations and businesses are opting to host websites internally. However, migrating a website to a new location is a process, and various factors ought to be factored in before the actual migration. It is paramount to ensure that the guiding principle of the highly available website hosted in a highly secure environment and with minimum downtime is followed for the benefit of both the customer and the business.
The migration of the externally hosted website to the internally hosted website will involve the following process;
- Back up the data from an externally hosted website
- download and store all the emails from the servers
- Redesign the website
- introduce a new domain server
- Transfer the domain name to a website host
To successfully build a web architecture, the initial stage should be the planning phase. In this stage on web architecture development, the information will be gathered regarding all the requirement. The IT professional tasked with the building the new architecture must familiarize with Tony’s Chips business to understand the business practices to chart a way forward in building a website that meets all the requirements. A feasibility study will be conducted to review the benefits and cost of the project, which inform recommendations on the action while considering the economic, time, technical, and operational factors. The analysis phase should follow the planning phase and in which a logical model of the web architecture will be built. The business through the IT professional will conduct interviews surveys, document reviews, observation to gather more information about web architecture. In this phase, a system requirement document has to be created and in which the costs and the benefits of the new system, the user and management requirements and alternative architecture will be outlined. Following this is the design and development of the physical model that meets the requirements earlier documented. At this stage, the necessary hardware and software will be determined.
Going with Tony’s Chips current website, the web architecture need not be in depth, significant architecture, but rather a simple architecture that fits the company’s small size. The management has raised concerns on redundancy in the system which necessitates the purchase of additional equipment. In this regard, the architecture will need to have two database servers, two web servers, replication servers for backup purposes, and system redundancy in case the primary system is not working. Moreover, A firewall will be installed to reinforce the site security. A DMZ network will be established to give the users access to the company’s web servers and thus access and view information therein as well as make purchases online. To further ensure that the site security is guaranteed, the database servers and the replication server will be protected by another firewall to ensure no unauthorized people get access to the server.
The web architecture will use software-based open source web development platform (LAMP). The components of LAMP to be used include; PHP, MySQL, Linux, and Apache. The Linux will be used as the operating system, Apache as the web server, MySQL as the database and PHP will be the scripting language giving space for dynamic content. The choice of these components is guided by the fact that they are open source and freely available, thus enormously reducing the overall cost of developing a new architecture. Moreover, the security features of Linux based software are far much better as compared to that of Windows.
To migrate the new servers, form their current location to internal hosting with minimal downtime requires careful planning. The migration should begin only with the new servers already up and running to ensure there will be a minimal downtime during the transition. All data has to be loaded to the new servers before migration is initiated. Moreover, the replication server must be checked to ensure they are functioning correctly for the smooth replication of all transactions from the externally hosted site to the internally hosted site. Inbuilt redundancy will be necessary to ensure that there is a recovery solution available in web architecture. Both the web server and the database server are the primary hardware and as such must have back up to ensure the site availability at any given time. A replication server in the site will ensure that the database server and web server mirror each other to ensure zero customer interruption in case of primary servers’ failure.
Alternatives
In place of site hosting, Tony’s Chips has a couple of viable options that they could pursue. The company may utilize the option of hosting a website with an external service with an already installed and running servers and services, but this significantly reduces Tony’s Chips control over the site. The company may also opt for web hosting services by leasing or renting entire architecture with already running servers but the physical servers stored by the web hosting company as opposed to the having servers within the company. This option is advantageous in it allows the company to have control over the servers without having to incur the cost of storing the servers or doing routine maintenance. Moreover, opting for web hosting services, Tony’s Chips company has the advantage of reducing downtime since most of these companies have well-established infrastructure which ensures the servers are operational 99 percent of the time, high security and cost saving since the company does not have to purchase infrastructure
Shared web hosting
The company also has the choice of going for the shared web hosting where Tony’s Chips website will be hosted on the same server with other sites. However, essential to note is that this option may not be the best for a company with high traffic. However, this option is advantageous in terms of cost since the company will have to pay a considerably lower amount of money to compensate the hosting company for the space they take in the server.
Virtual private server
This is an alternative that would let the company have a virtual private server sharing one physical server which acts as multiple separate servers. It is advantageous in that the company will have a shared hosting but will have its dedicated server. Even though the VPS shares the same hardware resources, each website is allocated a specific and dedicated portion of the computing resources.
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Justification of architecture selected
The chosen system architecture will have a primary web server and database server and a backup server for each. Moreover, both the two web servers and two databases will have a replication server. The architecture will as well consist of two firewalls which will give customers access to a web server while securing the database server and the replication server from unauthorized access. The architecture as it is will have met the leadership requirement for backup capability, internal hosting of the site, which will have sufficient system security to prevent unauthorized access of servers. The leadership insisted on having a backup site to ensure the website is up and running even in the event the primary servers goes down. This is well catered since the architecture involves installing two web servers, database servers. The replication server replicates the data between the two servers, which ensures that data is replicated on daily service without anyone having to copy data from one server to the other manually. This further ensures that human errors during input are prevented while ensures that the two servers have identical data. The failure of a primary server does not affect the site regarding content and data therein. However, essential to note is that when a failed server is fixed, a reconciliation must be done before bringing the server back online to ensuring the seamless running of the site. The continuous replication of servers will ensure that even in the event of the outage, the customers will not feel the effect.
Documentation of customer ordering bag of chips
The following are the steps a customer would take when ordering a bag of chips:
Go to the website: the customer has to search the domain name of the website company using a browser and log in. Assuming that the website domain name is www.tonychips.com, the customer will have to type this on the browser upon which he/she will be redirected to the main website page.
Choose the bag of chips. The main page of the website has a variety of chips available for the customer, and with easy navigation, the customer can find and select the kind of chips they would like to purchase
check chips information. When a customer clicks on a specific type of chips, the site will provide additional information about the chips, including the ingredients, the quantity available, the price and any discounts if there is any.
Add to cart. The customer is then prompted to add the item to the cart.
Payment information. After verifying that the item selected, the customer will be redirected to a payment page. On this page the customer will be requested to choose their preferred payment method among the various options, debit card, PayPal, Payoneer, etc. the customer will also be asked to provide information on their address for shipping purposes. For more straightforward future purchases, the customer will be asked to save the payment information but with an option of declining without any explanation.
Billing and Receipt. The last page will be a confirmation page to a customer to verify their purchase after which the customer will receive a receipt on the website and a copy sent to their email.
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Support system needed
After planning, analysis, designing, and implementation of the web architecture, the system, just like any other system, will be subject to support operation to ensure the continued smooth running of the system. Hosting the website internally means that the company will henceforth be responsible for additional support requirement and maintenance. The company will have to put measure and plans for regular checks on system hardware and software.
Software maintenance
The site will be subject to review on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. This will be to ensure that there are no broken links, unfunctional features, or out of date information. Particular attention should be focused on ensuring that there are no missing page titles or meta tags, load time, and the overall user experience. Moreover, the company will have to ensure that the site is free from grammatical and spelling errors, inconsistent formatting and style and unprofessional features. Furthermore, the website needs to be reviewed to gauge the website performance to set and measure the key performance indicators, search engine rating, and the website performance at least every month.
The health of the website will be contingent on the company’s commitment to security updates and bug fixing. The company should ensure there is constant update of the software and upgrade installation, bug fixing, security patches or any other update that may compromise the smooth running of web server, operating system, database server, CMS, etc. most importantly, the company’s should ensure speedy of patches installation as soon as they are released to avoid site vulnerability. Since the site has to be running throughout, the system administrators have to continually check and ensure that the whole system is backed up and most importantly ensure that the data is retrievable. The website layouts and technologies are likely to come incompatible with new browsers as time passes by and thus the company’s website administrator will have to continually review and test the website in various mainstream browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.
Hardware maintenance
The hardware component of the website is subject to constant support to prevent system failure. Regular checks on the disk usage are paramount to ensure that the production system is not used for archival purposes. Deleting old logs, emails, outdated software which are no longer used to ensure that there is more space and thus speed retrieval of information by Tony Chips customers. Moreover, checking the server utilization by reviewing CPU, RAMs, and network utilization to monitor the usage limits to add resources to the server and have a continued smooth running of the system. Hardware is as well subject to issues such as overheating, network failures, disk read errors which the company has to ensure are detected early enough to avoid system failure. The server cabling, firewall, as well as the server room, will need high maintenance by ensuring that the temperature is at the correct setting and is maintained for the optimal operation of servers. Moreover, room cleanliness must be maintained for the optimal services of the server.
Evaluation
The evaluation process will begin right from the initial process of migrating the externally hosted website to the time the internally hosted website is up and running. During the initiation phase, the evaluation will be done to determine the anticipated vulnerabilities and presumed conditions that may affect the integrity, confidentiality, and the availability of the website in the context of the planned operational environment. The evaluation will inform the management and the website managers of the necessary decisions regarding the migration, including the security control to be put in place. Assessment during the migration process would be on the basis if there were ant downtime and if there were any data lost during the migration. The evaluation will be done on the internally hosted website by hacking and testing that all the servers are working and in case of an outage, the backup servers will be up and running. This will be including temporarily putting out the primary servers to test if the systems are functioning correctly.
Moreover, the valuation will be done to test the customer’s experience on back up servers and if their activities will be interrupted in case of an outage. Following the completion of website migration, the evaluation will be examining the immediate and long-term impacts as well as summaries the overall performance of the site, including its efficiency and sustainability. The system analyst will go through the system requirement specification one by one to check if all that that was set to be achieved has been realized. Moreover, the software and the hardware compatibility and cost will be evaluated before implementation to determine if the cost of migrating and hosting the site is feasible and economically viable for Tony’s Chips company. Post implementation, the customer is the ultimate target and their feedback and experience on the site are critical in ensuring that the site I meeting the customer’s expectations. Evaluation at this stage will be done to understand the customer’s experience and act accordingly where needed.
In conclusion,