During March we were able to move two important Compulife sites/services to our new GoDaddy server, and apply the SSL security certificates to those services. The process took longer than we thought, for a couple of reasons.

The first site/service we moved over was "compulife.net". This is the domain name and service from which subscribers obtain the "webquote" option, which allows their sites to quote life insurance products for the cost of $96 per year.

Unfortunately the functionality of the new server, with respect to the .php software code, was different. In other words, what had worked quite nicely on the old server didn't work on the new server, even though they were supposed to be the same.

That difference required a significant amount of time to re-write some of our code. And of course all those changes needed to be duplicated into the hundreds of subscriber accounts who use our software.

The changes especially affected those of our subscribers who use the "consumerID option", which requires that a consumer enter their name, email and phone number prior to being able to obtain a quote. When the consumer clicks the "Compare Now", that sends the information on to the subscriber by email.

If the subscriber was simply displaying the page from our server, in a frame on their server, there was no problem. But if they had taken the code from our server, and placed the code on their server, it required that changes be made. The code on their server needed to be updated. That proved a significant problem/challenge for some customers who have others taking care of their websites.

If we are sometimes reluctant to make changes, or are slow or extra careful in making changes, this illustrates the dilemma. On the one hand we have had subscribers pushing us to apply an SSL certificate to our site/service. This is because they themselves have upgraded to an SSL certificate for their site and it creates an incompatibility issue if you call a non-secure site from your secure site (note, the reverse is not an issue).

Further, GoDaddy was bugging us to move to a new server, as the one we were on is getting quite old (we have been on it a long time). They assured us it was the same linux operating system and it was as simple as transferring over the files. In fact, they wanted to do it for us. I said no, that we would move the service over ourselves, one at a time. I simply don't trust promises that it's going to work and it's a good thing we did it that way.

After moving over compulife.net we received a number of contacts from subscribers with problems and spent quite a bit of time getting all that settled down. Subscribers wanting the changes were happy, subscribers who were operating happily were unhappy to be required to make some changes. These transitions are never easy, EVER. We apologize to anyone who was negatively affected.

The next site to change over was www.term4sale.ca, the Canadian version of Term4Sale. That also proved problematic as the company which holds the domain name could not point that domain name to the new site/server for almost 24 hours and the site was down for most of an entire day. Other problems with the changeover also emerged. We got through those relatively quickly because the software is on our site/server. Even so, we did not like being down for a day because Term4Sale is far too important a service to Compulife and our subscribers to be off-line for any period of time.