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Drupal Hosting & Monitoring

Drupal Hosting and Monitoring

Does your Drupal website need a home? We've explored many options for hosting your Drupal site and can give you the pros and cons of our favorite hosting solutions. These are just a few of the hosting options we turn to on behalf of our clients:
 

  • Amazon AWS
  • Pantheon
  • Rackspace
  • Server Topology Engineering

The perfect hosting solution is not the same for every website. We take the time to ensure that our client's choose the best option to grow with their website and business.

 

Portfolio Project: Phoenix College

Phoenix College heads the Miracopa Community College network, one of the largest districts in the nation and the largest provider of higher education in Arizona. Phoenix College needed a scalable, well-designed website that was as cutting edge as their curriculum and could serve as the go-to resource for students, faculty, and community members.

Sage Advice: Drupal Hosting Options

Summary

A bewildering array of services and hosting providers are available to host your Drupal site. Which should you choose?

In this post I will discuss the pros and cons of hosting your Drupal site on Pantheon, Rackspace Cloud, and a traditional hosting provider such as Hostgator with cPanel front end, which are three options we support at Sage Tree Solutions. Of course there are even more options available, but that's outside the scope of this article.

Pantheon

Pantheon is a cloud-based hosting solution developed specifically for Drupal. It combines simplicity in administration with best practices for very high Drupal performance and scalability and includes development and test servers alongside the production servers. A true one stop solution for most Drupal projects.

Price

At the time of this writing a standard Pantheon Drop - their terminology for a process space, which equates to a server elsewhere - costs $100 per month.

Pantheon Pros

Rackspace Cloud

In contrast to Pantheon, the Rackspace Cloud represents a completely unmanaged solution. You get a virtualized server in the Rackspace Cloud and are responsible for setting it up and maintaining it, a service we provide at Sagetree Solutions.

Price

At the time of this writing a Rackspace Cloud server with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB of disk, which is a good size for most small to medium size Drupal sites, costs $43.80 per month, and additional costs for bandwidth apply.

Rackspace Cloud Pros

Hostgator

Hostgator and many hosting providers like it represents the previous generation of hosting solutions. I.e. a tried and true setup, trusted provider and long track record. In addition, Hostgator VPS (virtual private server) instances have (optional) WHM and cPanel web interfaces to manage the server.

Price

At the time of this writing a Level 4 Hostgator VPS (virtual private server) with 1 GB RAM and 59 GB of memory, which is a good fit for medium size Drupal sites, costs $79.95 per month.

Hostgator Pros

Which should you choose?

If you need a hands-off Drupal hosting solution with built in security and scaling potential, Pantheon is your best bet and probably also the lowest cost solution.

If you like to tinker with your site and server, you are in good hands in the Rackspace Cloud.
Likewise, if you work with a trusted service partner to monitor and manage your server (such as having a server and site management agreement with Sage Tree Solutions) the Rackspace Cloud represents a good solution with potential to grow with your business and ideas.

Portfolio Project: Optex America

Optex America provides industrial strength sensors for high security applications including airports, commercial buildings, military installations, nuclear power plants, seaports and many more. The existing Optex web site was hard to maintain and did not provide all of the interactive features that their internal sales team needed to interact with their customer base of distributors, dealers and system integrators. Optex turned to Sage Tree Solutions to build a new, state of the art web site using the Drupal open source platform.

The key features of the new site are: 

Portfolio Project: SANDcamp

Sage Tree Solutions loves to participate in the Drupal community, so we jumped at the chance to help out with the 2011 and 2012 SANDcamp website. We migrated the 2010 Drupal 6 site from its old hosting provider and set up a new hosting environment through Aqcuia. Our in-house themer Zakiya Khabir got the site looking fresh and ready for Druplers to start signing up and submitting their sessions. Sage Tree Solutions was only one pair of helping hands for the SANDcamp website, the overall payoff was a result of hard-core Drupalers who are just as much in love with the community as we are.

Portfolio Project: REVA

REVA Medical, Inc needed a website that was compliant with their industries biotech laws, so Sage Tree Solutions gave them just that. We started by rebuilding their site in Drupal 6 and migrating their content. Then we designed and implemented a custom theme. To give their investors the attention they deserved we built out an entirely new section of their site called, “Investors” which gave those visitors access to news, share information, FAQs and much more.

Portfolio Project: North Coast Photo

North Coast Photo is photographer Gary Todoroff's online media gallery. Sage Tree Solutions designed a simple sitewhere Gary could upload his work and give his audience a way to contact him. We provided Gary with a hosting solution and continue to provide file sharing solutions for his photography printing studio, as well as general support.

Sage Advice: Disaster Recovery - What Will You Do When Your Drupal Site Really Breaks?

Disasters Happen - It's Just a Question of When

Spurred by a completely broken server at one of our clients we are re-evaluating our own backups and disaster recovery plans. As we all know, most people give little thought to backups, and even less to how to use them for recovery. In the meantime our servers quietly hum along and then act up at the most inopportune time. It is not a question whether a server will fail or not, it will - it is just a question of when it will fail and what you will do to recover from the failure.

Know the Risks

Your first line of defense is knowing your site, identifying single points of failure, and placing a probability on the failure. Then you figure out how much mitigation you need to reduce your exposure to risk.

Mitigate the Risk

Code and databases are most prone to break or otherwise get corrupted. Fortunately we have easy solutions in code repositories and backups. The harder problem is how you will make use of those tools to recover from a failure, but we will address this later. For now make sure you create backups on a regular basis and that at least some of these backups do not live on the same server. Also make sure that you have backups for everything, the server OS and its configuration, your site code and the database(s).

The Importance of Offsite Backups

Or maybe we should rather call this "the importance of off-server backups". Regardless, you need to absolutely make sure most of the backups are not stored on the server itself. If the server crashes completely and takes its storage with it - believe me, it happens! I have seen it many times, most recently last week - you need those off server backups. So be absolutely sure there are backups elsewhere and recent enough for your comfort level. You will need them some day.

Develop a Recovery Procedure

Having backups and spare parts in hand is well and good, but you want to be able to do something with them. Moreover, when you need them you will be very stressed or worse, not be there yourself. You need a recovery procedure, fully documented and ready to go. Take your time with this, you will be glad you did. Make sure all steps are covered, that someone only vaguely familiar with the setup can understand it, and most importantly, that it contains information on how to access passwords and other security features in a secure manner.

Test the Integrity of Your Backups

Finally, you want to be sure you can actually get a server back with the help of your recovery procedure and necessary parts and backups. At the very least review the recovery procedure once or twice a year and check for accuracy given the current server configuration, and look through your backups to ensure they are readable and able to be unpacked. Better still is to perform the basic recovery steps and thus test whether it all works as planned.

Portfolio Project: AMLOC.net

We designed and developed the website for AMLOC (Asset Management Line of Credit), a financial services company. We also provided copywriting and marketing services, including developing a slide show for customers to understand the products more fully. We continue to provide hosting and IT support services.

Portfolio Project: AutoImagery.com

AutoImagery is the premier source for drag racing photography. As one of our long time clients, we have provided them with hosting and IT support services for their HUGE image catalog.

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