What is the right way to transfer leads from a website to a local CRM?

I have a website with a form which allows a visitor to submit their name, phone, email etc. This website is hosted at a website hosting company.

I also have a CRM system for managing leads. This resides locally in my office. I programmed this CRM system.

When a visitor enters their name, phone etc on the public website, ideally I would like that lead data to be transferred instantly into my local CRM system.

My question is what is the most professional way to开发者_如何转开发 do this?

Option 1: One option is have the website form produce a text file of the lead on the website. The local CRM could have a cron job running every minute to FTP up, retrieve leads, and import them into the CRM. But this would not be instant.

Option 2: Another option is to have the website form post directly into the local CRM like this:

form action="http://www.{IP ADDRESS OF LOCAL CRM}/signup-thankyou.php"

What is the best way to do this? I am the author of the CRM system, and I am a PHP programmer so I should be able to program whatever is the recommended solution.

Thank you.

I agree with Pekka that option 2 is bad as it publicizes the existence of your CRM server. Instead i would have it send the data from the public server to the CRM server directly, once the form is submited and processed. This way you can lock the CRM server down to only taking connections from the public webserver and move this activity to a non standard port.

your CRM could connect to the remote DB where your site lives

or

you could do a server-side POST request from the signup script, see cURL function reference.