If you’re a Namesco customer with a website which hasn’t had much TLC for a few years, you may have received a scary email or telephone call from them.

We received an email from a lovely lady called Ros who had received such an email, and – to Namesco’s credit, a phone call too. This is a BIG deal so it’s great Namesco didn’t just rely on emails that could have gone astray as it will have cost them quite a bit of resource to ring so many customers (I’m assuming it would have been quite a few).

At the end of this month, Namesco are taking down any sites which are running really old versions of PHP. This is so that their infrastructure can just run and support newer (and hopefully more secure) versions. But if you just update the version of PHP your old site uses, it can break the website. So it seems Namesco opted to take down the sites in question rather than upgrade their PHP level and leave them broken – perhaps because leaving up a broken site could potentially reveal vunerabilities.

Ros’ site was running PHP 5.4, and was on version 4 of WordPress. She was also wondering if she was going to need a new website so as to get it up to date, as it was so old (in website terms). However, I didn’t feel she needed a new site as she liked her existing design and felt there would be a lot of content to move – plus of course a new site would be quite expensive now a days. So I advised we could just do the upgrades required and then make some improvements to the site over the next few weeks, as and when she wishes. 

We “met” (via video call) last Thursday and I later emailed her a plan. We then sorted out a new client agreement and deposit and her site was all upgraded and secure during Tuesday! The work itself was very quick and came in a long way under the worst-case-scenario cost I’d discussed with her. And it was all done with plenty of time to spare before the end-of-the-month deadline.

If you’ve also had a scary email from Namesco and are worried about what you’re going to do, do get in touch to see if we can help.