I’m working on a client’s PHP website which is hosted through the original company who built the site. There’s a section on the site where a user clicks on a country name from a list, the parameters are posted in the URL and the database is queried using these parameters and the holiday packages from that country are displayed on the page. All standard stuff.
Now, as the company who host the website won’t give me direct access to the db (understandable, I could be anyone) but want to charge my client quite an extortionate amount for adding a couple of updates, I’m trying to come up with an alternative solution. These are:
1) Create a MySql database on my own webhost and access it externally
2) Create an XML file and query that instead, using PHP and XSLT.
Just to clarify, I’ll be manually updating the data myself, my client won’t ever have more than 30 pacakges, so it’s quite sustainable.
So my question is which should I choose? I’m worried about the speed and security of accessing an MySQL db remotely (and I’m not even sure I can do it with my web host), but would a local XML file be as insecure?
Thanks in advance!
Gem
Hosting company should give access to the client – they have all the rights to access and modify their data. Normaly hosts give access to database via phpMyAdmin.
Otherwise, if you put the XML file into folder that is not publickly available then your script could access it and there shouldn’t be problems with it.