A secure, cost-effective, and performance-optimized online social Web service

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In the completed Engage project, a preliminary version of the social networking website for bridgingchina.ca was constructed with interface to Sina Microblog social networking site via OAuth 2.0. Currently under testing, several important steps remain before bridgingchina.ca can be taken into staging and eventually into production. These steps are centered around the issues of security, hosting and operational cost, performance, user data management, logging and analysis. In this continued project, we first aim to strengthening the security of the developed PHP and Mysql code so that the user information including password are strongly encrypted and protected and that malicious attacks to the database such as SQL injections can be detected and handled. Second, detailed cost analysis will be conducted to compare between dedicated servers, rented virtual hosts and cloud computing. Especially, the autoscaling mechanism of frontend servers as well as backend database via Amazon EC2, rackspace and possibly other cloud providers will be studied in detail to minimize the company operational cost. Third, several optimizations regarding page download and database query speed will be conducted to reduce the response time. Finally, detailed data analysis, logging and synchronization functions will be incorporated to handle the user data analysis and cleaning, move and synchronize data automatically between the testing server, staging server, and backup server. The objective is to continue to fix the problems found in the current version of code to build a secure, cost-effective and high performance website that matches production quality.