HOSTING IS DEAD
How to break free from servers, slash costs,
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. When Bad Things Happen To Good Websites 4 - 5
3. Traditional Hosting Solutions 6 – 7
4. The Pantheon Difference 8 – 10
5. Evaluating DIY Hosting 11
6. Budgeting for DIY Hosting vs. Pantheon 12
7. Pantheon in Action 13 – 14
HOSTING IS DEAD
How to break free from servers, slash costs,
and grow your Drupal website.
DrupAl WEbSITE
SEEkS rOI HErO.
Most executives see their websites as marketing investments rather than administrative expenses. After investing tens of thousands of dollars on a Drupal website from the best developers they can find, and then purchasing a premium hosting package, site owners expect to begin generating a return on investment.
They’re shocked when the site slows to a crawl or crashes altogether. Even after a lengthy build process, it turns out they’re missing the infrastructure to handle load spikes, fix bugs, and add features. That’s because they bought “hosting”, a legacy service based on a static publishing model that’s missing many mission critical capabilities needed to power a modern website. You chose Drupal to remain lean and agile. Shouldn’t evolving your Drupal website feel the same way? This white paper details the infrastructure and management challenges unique to Drupal websites, and presents a new solution that allows you to build, launch, and run websites that scale with the click of a button—without DIY servers or sysadmins.
WHEN bAD THINGS HAppEN
TO GOOD WEbSITES
You can spend thousands on traditional hosting and system administrators to head off common problems that take many new site owners by surprise. But then you’ll never be the ROI hero for your Drupal website. Here’s what to look out for:
Top 5 Drupal EmErgEnCIEs
1. The site crashes when social sharing brings a flood of traffic.
Social sharing sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit make it difficult to predict a viral traffic spike. Even a small website can find itself flooded with millions of visitors without any advertising. No one wants an error message to take up all their time in the spotlight.
2. Response times slow to a crawl.
The live site is significantly slower live than it was when you developed and tested it. Now testing and debugging must take place in front of a live audience. 3. A robot breaches security
The person tasked with updating security patches had other priorities, and couldn’t stay on top of it. Or, the new developers you just brought in for a site refresh are constantly requesting SSH keys and passwords. You’ve lost track of who had access to what in the past. Now a robot has hijacked or defaced the site. 4. The site never, ever changes.
Updates are so time-consuming that no one makes them anymore. Version con-trol is difficult. Everyone is afraid of crashing the site because there’s no safe, re-liable way to test and deploy changes. When updates go live, problems surface. Developers must do emergency surgery on the live site. You built this site to be a living, breathing face of your organization, changing over time as your service evolves. But people are so afraid of updates that it now remains static.
5. Data gets lost.
Backups were maintained on site, and there’s no easy way to recover data in a disaster.
Historically, only companies with large budgets could deploy high-performance Drupal websites that could be quickly scaled and easily updated. That’s be-cause traditional “hosting” alone doesn’t begin to address these emergencies. Additional services, servers and practices are needed.
WHy DO THESE prOblEmS
Occur TO DrupAl SITES?
Four key challenges can keep a Drupal website from meeting traffic demands when it’s powered by traditional hosting:
site updates are cumbersome and high-risk.
Managing Drupal over the lifecycle of a website requires workflow tools—not just production servers. Professional Drupal developers need to follow best practices like version control, staging servers, deployment workflows, and automated backups. Without the proper tooling in place, the development process takes more time and introduces significant risk. Even simple bug fixes and updates are cumbersome and can take down the live site.
Production environments require Drupal-specific configuration. Running a speedy and scalable Drupal site requires a highly tuned production environment. This means setting up more than a traditional LAMP stack. Next generation tools like Redis and Varnish are essential, and every layer requires its own specific configuration. Hosting doesn’t provide this kind of expertise and management, and high-performance Drupal consultants come at a premium. Server configurations in production
environments don’t always mirror those in development or test. When people develop on their local machines, they don’t typically have every layer of the stack. New problems emerge when the site goes live. The site was well designed, but configurations weren’t correct in the production environment. The site crashes.
scaling is manual and complex.
If you need to drive a lot of unique pages, you’re bound to outgrow your server. What next? You might upsize a VPS, but that’s risky, messy, and guaranteed to introduce downtime. You could move from a VPS to a cluster, but now you’ve introduced a major architectural change: a remote database and a networked file system. You could manually add nodes within your cluster, but each addition is another opportunity for something to go wrong.
Migrating a site from one architecture to the other requires taking down the site, porting over the data, flipping DNS switches, and hoping for the best. What happens the next time you need to scale? It’s a risky, manual, complex process.
The bad and the good
cHAllENGE #1
cHAllENGE #2
cHAllENGE #3
Evaluating DIY Hosting
The right questions can help you and your team cut through the noise. Here are the 7 questions to
1. How will we manage Version: control gives you a safe and reliable
pANTHEON IN AcTION
What developers are saying:
“ my project management life was in shambles
before I found pantheon. Their entire setup puts
your team in a position to succeed during
devel-opment. From git version control, to staging for
client testing and sign off, to going live for your
site’s large audience. spinning up smaller
web-sites is also a snap. I’ve been the ‘e-genius’ to
groups who needed a quick, inexpensive
solu-tion for their online goals. In fact, if you’re using
anything besides pantheon, you’re wasting time.”
- Andrew Ward
TrADITIONAl HOSTING
SOluTIONS
There’s no shortage of hosting options for Drupal. But when site owners evaluate their options, uncertainty prevails. Drupal is complex. An organization must evaluate not only the hosting solution itself, but also its fit with their own Drupal website. How do you make an informed decision when you don’t know what you don’t know? Here’s what many site owners wish they had known about traditional hosting solutions–before launching their site.
In-House, self-Hosting
Someone on your IT team must carry the pager and respond to incidents 24/7. This person needs to learn not only Drupal, but also the technologies necessary to support Drupal, including git, Varnish, Redis, and deployment best practices. Not to mention managing hardware, operating system and even power to the servers.
Every time a security breach is found, an update must be installed
immediately. In addition, high availability is expensive. Redundant servers often sit unused. Clusters cost thousands of dollars monthly. This is beyond the budget for most Drupal sites.
rackspace, softlayer, Dedicated Hosting
Large hosting providers can provide dedicated physical servers with a few levels of management support. Site owners who opt for the high service level can receive operating system maintenance. But what if your problem isn’t related to the server itself? You’re on your own. Development tools, deployment workflows, performance optimization, help with scaling — these aren’t available.
Virtual private servers /amazon EC2
Virtual private servers and cloud instances are affordable and increasingly reliable, but not really scalable. Moving to a bigger instance requires manual migration or “upsizing” and can be risky and/or require hours of downtime. While they afford some flexibility and cost savings for less resource-heavy uses like dev environments, they carry all the maintenance responsibilities of dedicated servers, and in many cases are less reliable due to cloud outages and “noisy neighbors”.
managed Cloud Hosting
Dedicated managed cloud hosting is available from some specialized vendors. This provides redundancy and often includes some workflow tools for deployment, but you still scale by adding machines to a cluster, and frequently the configuration for development is not precisely the same as live. Because these services require on building bespoke clusters for every client, they are cost-intensive, and the full architecture can’t affordably be mirrored in dev and test. Many projects spend 6 to 12 months in development. The costs add up. In addition, developers lose time because these managed-cloud hosting solutions don’t have the latest best-practice developer tools. Scaling remains manual and expensive. Enterprise support is available, but at an additional, premium cost.
shared Hosting
Shared hosting is cheap and limits your responsibility, but it’s too unreliable and underpowered for professional use cases. These servers also lack developer tools, and aren’t configured for performance.
Hire a Drupal Devops professional to manage Hosting For You
A qualified sysadmin with Drupal expertise is one of the most difficult roles to find and fill in the tech industry. Moreover, the cost is prohibitive for most companies.
Evaluating DIY Hosting
The right questions can help you and your team cut through the noise. Here are the 7 questions to
1. How will we manage Version: control gives you a safe and reliable
“ as a site owner, you face a choice.
sink more time and budget into
putting band-aids on the
hosting problem?
or, break free of servers and
move to a modern way of building,
launching, and running Drupal sites?”
Amazing Website
Scaling
Dev Tools and Workflow
Operating System
Hardware
DIY Hosting
Amazing Website
Scaling
Dev Tools and Workflow
Operating System
Hardware
Managed Hosting
Amazing Website
Scaling
Dev Tools and Workflow
Operating System
Hardware
THE pANTHEON DIFFErENcE
pantheon is the professional Website platform
Your website itself is unique, but the infrastructure behind it probably isn’t. Pantheon eases the burden for managing a high-performance website, without incurring additional costs in system administration.
The Difference
get more from your developers with less —
using Drupal power tools and built-in workflows
• Start new projects on the fly, without waiting for IT or procurement.
• Eliminate sysadmin bottlenecks so you can take your site from the kickoff meeting to up and running, faster than ever before.
• Eliminate costly mistakes or “it works on my machine” bugs by following the best-practice Drupal workflow for site development. • Keep your team on the same page, avoiding lost work and wasted
effort, thanks to modern version control.
• Use best-in-class tools to develop your site and maximize its performance: Drush, Varnish. and Redis.
• Use the built-in workflow to invite colleagues, themers, managers, stakeholders. It takes just seconds to give a developer site access through the Dashboard.
• Get real-time updates on active work through the Dashboard, and keep track of the entire project history.
• Remove team members and control access to the project.
• Cut new developer ramp-up by standardizing your toolset on Pantheon.
go live with one-click deployment
• Push new code with one click in the dashboard. No architectural changes or surprises.
• Save 10x time and effort by deploying your site with the same platform you used to build it.
scale in seconds through the pantheon grid, without
making risky architectural changes
• Leave your VPSs, traditional managed servers, cloud instances, and Rube-Goldberg clusters behind.
stay safe with hands-free security and control.
• Let Pantheon handle your system administration.
No need to secure or harden your Linux systems, control SSH access, maintain firewalls, or deal with kernel versions. Pantheon makes millions of daily monitoring checks at sub-minute resolution.
• Get automated backups done for you. You determine your backup schedule and the retention periods.
• Call on Pantheon’s ops team 24/7/365. With decades of collective experience building some of the largest and highest-traffic sites in the world, the Pantheon team “carries the pager” for the infrastructure, so site owners can focus on what’s important.
24/7 emergency uptime support and site monitoring SLA guaranteed uptime
Unlimited support tickets, with two hour response time during business hours
Managed scaling and traffic planning Enterprise site launch service
2h
Single point of contact until go - live Importing site onto Pantheon Detailedsite audit Platformtraining testingLoad Performancetuning
get more
Freshen up with one- click Drupal core updates.
Evaluating DIY Hosting
The right questions can help you and your team cut through the noise. Here are the 7 questions to
1. How will we manage Version: control gives you a safe and reliable
“ our development shop used to spend a lot of
resources on operational things, but the big one was
monitoring the performance of the site. It wasn’t
our core skillset. It was hard to stay on schedule,
because a server emergency could interrupt us at
any time. You can’t tell your client to wait. You drop
what you’re doing and you deal with it right there.”
pANTHEON IN AcTION
What developers are saying:
- Matt Johnson
EVAluATING DIy HOSTING
The right questions can help you and your team cut through the noise. Here are 7 questions to ask as you evaluate DIY hosting options: 1. How will we manage version control?
Why it matters: Version control gives you a safe and reliable way to make and reverse
changes to your website while it’s in development. Alternatively, you could edit your site directly via SFTP, but you risk overwriting and losing valuable work. If several developers are collaborating on one site, version control is a necessity.
2. How will we manage development and test environments, as well as live site deployments?
Why it matters: Separate development and testing environments provide a safe
place to develop and try new site features without interfering with your live site. The alternative is to make changes directly to your live site, which usually leads to bugs and downtime. A safe deployment workflow is also key, ensuring painless site launches and feature releases.
3. Who will do the initial server configuration setting up the
OS, web server, in memory catching, edge caching, and Apache Solr?
Why it matters: People get upset when pages load slowly or your site goes down under
load. Hosting environments need to be set up properly, and caching systems configured to withstand traffic spikes.
4. Who will mange the server software, including security updates?
Why it matters: The systems running your Drupal site need to be maintained to keep
up with security releases and the latest software versions. Failure to do this leads to hacked websites and exposed customer data. Some time should also be budgeted for ongoing server tuning, as your site’s features and traffic levels will vary over time. 5. Who is the on-call escalation point for the server software?
Why it matters: What happens when your site goes down at 3am? If rebooting the
server doesn’t fix it, who does? Someone on your IT team needs to carry the pager and respond to incidents 24/7. This person needs to learn not only Drupal, but also the technologies necessary to support Drupal, including git, Varnish, Redis, and deployment best practices. Every time a security breach is found, an update must be installed immediately.
6. What’s our plan to scale resources if we need to,
and do we have high availability in place to ensure uptime? Questions to answer
Evaluating DIY Hosting
The right questions can help you and your team cut through the noise. Here are the 7 questions to
1. How will we manage Version: control gives you a safe and reliable
What developers are saying:
“ I switched all my clients over to pantheon
im-mediately. Pantheon lets us scale as a firm. I
don’t have to spend all my time being a
sys-admin. I can support clients and provide
in-finitely better customer service. We’re much
more responsive in terms of building new
things and addressing bugs. We’re allowed to
be pure developers. I don’t get many 4am fire
drills anymore.”
- Kelly Bell
Item Hours
(Minimum estimates for a typical website. Complex sites require
additional hours.)
Cost with Traditional Hosting
(Based on $125 hourly rate for Drupal system administrator)
Cost with pantheon
Dev server setup 5 hours $625 Cost Included Version Control 5 hours $625 Cost Included Production server setup 10 hours $1,250 Cost Included
Safe Deployment
Workflow 20 hours $2,500 Cost Included Testing server setup
and continuous integration
20 hours $2,500 Cost Included
Performance tuning 20 hours $2,500 Cost Included Cache servers 20 hours $2,500 Cost Included High Availability 100 hours $12,500 Cost Included
Total 200 hours $25,500 FREE
Item Hours
(Minimum estimates for a typical website. Complex sites require
additional hours.)
Cost with Traditional Hosting
(Based on $125 hourly rate for Drupal system administrator)
Cost with pantheon
One-Time Savings:
ongoing monthly Cost to manage DIY Hosting for a Typical Website
$25,000 or more
buDGETING FOr DIy HOSTING
VS. pANTHEON
Web infrastructure presents a number of hidden costs. Some costs are triggered by your hosting provider, while others come from vendors or your own internal management. Below is a sample budgeting guide for a complete Drupal infrastructure set-up, versus the costs of a site running on the Pantheon Platform.
pANTHEON IN AcTION
Pantheon’s professional website platform runs tens of thousands of sites serving over 100 million requests daily for customers like Kendall Jackson Wines, NBC Universal, and UC Berkeley. They’re always ready to scale even in a surge. Request a cost savings analysis and see how Pantheon can turn you into an ROI hero for your Drupal website. Ready to scale to large audiences in a single bound. Right from day one.
