Upgrade problems and solutions are an issue with people that don’t want to spend money. Ultimately they cause problems in lost revenue. I have non-digital examples but I’ll make this post about the digital world of e-commerce.

Did you ever have a boss who just didn’t want to spend the money to upgrade a software because they didn’t want to spend the money? You mentioned it to them time and time again, but they just wanted to ignore you. In their mind they thought,”Why should I pay $250 to upgrade!” Well, in this little story we’re going to find out why losing $15,000 is not smarter than spending $250 for the upgrade.

As administrators, we all get notices of upgrade patches available or pending. If the system is online, sometimes tech support knows the problems in the version you are using and they are working on the solutions for the next version. All the boss has to do it say “yes” to the upgrade and then the headaches never happen from other customers learning the hard way.

When a host notifies you that they are going to sunset a particular version of PHP. You should listen. Why? Because the CMS you are using may ultimately only function on a certain version of that PHP. Why is this important? Because when the host decides to sunset….or quit offering that version of PHP on their server, your CMS will stop working immediately….and your website will crash!!

Did this happen to my client? Yup. Did they know it was going to happen? Yup. Did they scream bloody murder when it happened like they never saw it coming and never received notifications? Yup.

So the tech support at the host spoke at length with the CEO and told them,”we told you we were going to stop offering it. You should have upgraded your CMS. Now it is too late. We’re not putting it back on”. Then the denial set it. Cry cry cry.

Did the SEO guy get called? Yup. What happened you ask. We’ll I’ll tell you.

Everyone in North America and Europe had to be called. Most of them were sleeping and did not care that the irresponsible company let their version crash. It took hours of calls and discussions to find out a solution. Finally after all available vendors on planet Earth were spoken to, a vendor was found that had clients on the old version. Yup, the old world.

The solution was to migrate the site to another host that was still using the old version of PHP and then the CMS would function. Then an upgrade was possible to the CMS. Did the CEO have to spend money? Yup. Did the e-commerce site lose $15,000 being down? Yup.

After the site was migrated to a new host, the CMS worked again. Sales were immediately possible. Thousands of dollars of sales immediately took place making the expenditure worth it. Did the SEO guy save the day? Yup. How was this possible? MBA’s have training in risk management, which means they understand evaluating risk and reward. That’s why taking the upgrade is an easy decision for an expert evaluating losing thousands in sales versus a small upgrade charge.

Want help evaluating your CMS? Email Allied Virtual Media for strategic advisory.