Cal Evans has a reminder to all of the businesses out there that have sites and use web site hosting services - only you can prevent web failures and potentially alienate customers.

Last night I wrote the info@ email address on a website and asked a questions about their product. They politely responded with two links to their website. This morning however, when I went to visit them, I was greeted with the message above. It’s now three hours later and the site is still "experiencing difficulties". [...] This problem can be prevented by business owners insisting on – and paying for – “Best Practices” in their software vendors.

He offers a few suggestions to businesses to help prevent this sort of (catastrophic?) failure for their businesses including having a rollout and rollback plan and having a good set of tests to make doubly sure things work before the code even meets the public.

Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!

We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?

He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.

Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!

We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?

He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.

As mentioned in several places (including over on digg.com), the GoPHP5 project has launched their website to help everyone keep tabs on how the push towards PHP5 is going - GoPHP5.org.

The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

Included in the site are a list of web hosts that support the GoPHP5 project, software projects that have committed themselves to "being PHP5" by the deadline and - front and center - a countdown timer for how long they have left.

Other sites mentioning the GoPHP5 site/effort:

• Alexey Zakhlestin's blog
• the Syntux.net Blog
• this new post on the Symfony blog

As mentioned in several places (including over on digg.com), the GoPHP5 project has launched their website to help everyone keep tabs on how the push towards PHP5 is going - GoPHP5.org.

The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

Included in the site are a list of web hosts that support the GoPHP5 project, software projects that have committed themselves to "being PHP5" by the deadline and - front and center - a countdown timer for how long they have left.

Other sites mentioning the GoPHP5 site/effort:

• Alexey Zakhlestin's blog
• the Syntux.net Blog
• this new post on the Symfony blog