News Archive


Is your old website costing you money?

Sep 2016

If you’re with a mainstream UK web hosting company like 1-and-1 and operating an old-ish website then consider what you may be paying just to keep your old website going.

1-and-1 recently increased their charges for what they call “Extended Support for older PHP” to over £60 per year. This charge is on top of your normal domain registration and web hosting expenses, and it isn’t optional.

Why are hosting companies charging extra?

The fee is to cover the additional security impact to 1-and-1 of running an unsupported version of PHP. This makes sense; versions 4, 5.2 and 5.4 of PHP are no longer getting security updates from the PHP Community and that represents a security headache for hosts like 1-and-1.

So, if you were already thinking about a design refresh, some extra features or a whole new website, then check whether you’re being charged extra just to keep your old website limping through each month.

What to do?

It might help you decide it’s time to say goodbye to your old website. Talk to us about a new, modern, responsive site to better support your business.

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Integration projects (or how to connect Thing 1 and Thing 2)

Sep 2016

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Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/donnieray/
If you’re a small business, how do you connect Thing 1 to Thing 2? These are the kinds of projects that get us excited at Wimborne Business Systems because it can be relatively simple to add real value to our customers by making two systems work together. In the industry these are called “integration projects”.

Examples of small scale integration projects we’ve delivered in the last year have involved connecting up these services and databases:

In some cases we will use an API or ODBC. But it’s sometimes a case of just wiring up a to a service like IFTTT or Zapier.

And this week two more opportunities for connecting things together have come in, so we’re looking at starting some more integration projects very soon.