Hi All,

I’ve been working in web/internet technologies for over a decade now and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a very sad situation. Most small businesses, who’s sole form of revenue comes from the company’s web page, do not make use of a sandbox.

What is a sandbox? In the toddler sense of the word, its a safe place to go and play. If you fall down, it doesn’t hurt (unless you nail the cement side with your head). In the computer sense, it is almost the same thing, except there are no cement walls. A sandbox in its purest form is an exact duplicate of the production environment. Its purpose is to allow a developer to write new code and debug current code, without the risk of bringing down the productions site. People of the non-geek type are really unaware of how the smallest code defect can, under the best case, prevent the web page from displaying and, under the worst case, send the data to the wrong place. Imagine billing a customer only to find out that the credit card and card info were from a different account. I’ve seen it happen. In most cases, another developer, such as myself, will have to spend hours upon hours trying to restore the data to its appropriate state (after the bug has been located). Unfortunately, in some rare cases, I’ve had to go to the boss and tell him, ‘the data is beyond repair’. Believe me when I tell you, the sandbox is worth the extra expense.

I’m convinced, how do I get a sandbox? Most likely, if your a small house, your hosting your box in a dedicated hosting environment. This makes things easy in that all you have to do is call the isp and tell them you want to setup a sandbox for your system. If they don’t know what a sandbox is, send them to this blog, or better yet, find one that does. If your looking to save money (aren’t we all?) then you can request a box that is less powerful. Ram and CPU changes will not affect the nature of the sandbox. It should have the same OS and modules (php, asp) installed. If you’re a larger house, your probably hosting on a co-located server (A box you own that rents space and a connection at the isp). If this is your situation, you probably have a system administrator (sys admin) who can easily create the sandbox once you explain what you need. If you don’t have a sys admin, see my next blog!!

I have a sandbox, now what? Now you can safely send your geeks into the realm of the development. They can try anything and not worry about it. Once your geeks are satisfied that their code is production worthy, you “push” the code to the production environment.

HeadGeek.

Aaron