Following the end of Microsoft's official support for the Windows Server 2003 operating system, Hosting Solutions strongly recommends migrating Windows Server 2003 (and earlier) hosting plans to the new Windows Server 2012; this transition does not cause any disruption or interruption to receiving/sending mail and to the website. For general information on migrating to the new Windows Server 2012, please refer to the following page: Migrating Windows Server 2003 Hosting Plans to Windows Server 2012: general information and news.

MS Access database: migration to MySQL recommended

Windows Server 2012 is a less permissive operating system when it comes to managing connections to the Access database. This means that it is necessary to check that web pages accessing the MS Access database perform the operation correctly, by opening and closing connections and not making multiple connections to the same database, etc.

These differences between Windows Server 2012 and 2003 can obviously lead to malfunctions in web applications written for Windows Server 2003 or earlier. To overcome these issues - and also achieve an improvement in performance - Hosting Solutions recommends the migration of MS Access databases to MySQL databases, which is included free of charge in all hosting plans.

o carry out the migration, you can follow this procedure:

• export the current MS Access database in a format that can be imported by MySQL (e.g. csv format);
• create a new MySQL database;
• import the .csv file into the new MySQL database;
• Modify the database connection strings in the application source;
• Modify the database access and possibly the queries in the application source;
• Correctly configure the indexes on the tables of the new MySQL database in order to optimise its performance.

For details of the web interface for managing the MySQL database, see the following page: PhpMyAdmin Guide

For information on connection scripts to the MySQL database, see the following page Access to MySQL database