Thought I would post this here as I'm hoping someone knowledgeable could give me his point of view.
I used to run a fairly basic Joomla website for a real estate company. Over the years it got way too large for Joomla so they decided to hire a developer to get their own CMS, where the database could be updated offline and the website synched with it. (I'm just a basic self-taught amateur web designer so this is over my head) Long story short: they put that CMS, which used elements of ExpressionEngine, on my server but as it grew larger than 10GB I had to upgrade my own hosting package in order for it to keep up. The problem was that as soon as it was moved the database stopped working. The backend seemed fine and the owner of the business could still see all the properties, but on the homepage there was a message saying the licence was not valid for this domain. ("The local license key is invalid for this location. Manage your license.") My suspicion is that this site was developed in not so legit ways as the developer threw a fit that I had moved the site, saying it is a nightmare to configure, etc. My hosting company never believed this and I am also inclined to mistrust said developer, who I think is hiding behind "it's complicated". The site was offline for 5 days and he's moved it to his own host now, so has full control.
My knowledge is too limited to be 100% sure about this. This is basically a PHP driven CMS with Ioncube on it. The developer said Ioncube is what was making it hard to migrate to a different server (within same host), but he never answered my question as to why it had Ioncube on it in the first place, and why it was still working fine in the backend. Can anyone shed light on this? Would you agree this developer is probably a bit shady or am I being paranoid?
I used to run a fairly basic Joomla website for a real estate company. Over the years it got way too large for Joomla so they decided to hire a developer to get their own CMS, where the database could be updated offline and the website synched with it. (I'm just a basic self-taught amateur web designer so this is over my head) Long story short: they put that CMS, which used elements of ExpressionEngine, on my server but as it grew larger than 10GB I had to upgrade my own hosting package in order for it to keep up. The problem was that as soon as it was moved the database stopped working. The backend seemed fine and the owner of the business could still see all the properties, but on the homepage there was a message saying the licence was not valid for this domain. ("The local license key is invalid for this location. Manage your license.") My suspicion is that this site was developed in not so legit ways as the developer threw a fit that I had moved the site, saying it is a nightmare to configure, etc. My hosting company never believed this and I am also inclined to mistrust said developer, who I think is hiding behind "it's complicated". The site was offline for 5 days and he's moved it to his own host now, so has full control.
My knowledge is too limited to be 100% sure about this. This is basically a PHP driven CMS with Ioncube on it. The developer said Ioncube is what was making it hard to migrate to a different server (within same host), but he never answered my question as to why it had Ioncube on it in the first place, and why it was still working fine in the backend. Can anyone shed light on this? Would you agree this developer is probably a bit shady or am I being paranoid?