Hosting is Dead

Hosting is Dead

How to break free from servers, slash costs, and grow

your Drupal website.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction
2 When Bad Things Happen To Good Websites
3 Traditional Hosting Solutions
4 The Pantheon Difference
5 Evaluating DIY Hosting
6 Pantheon vs Hosting: Budget Comparison
7 Pantheon in Action
P.2

P.3 4

P.5 6

P. 7 9

P.10

P.11

P. 12 13

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1
Introduction

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.
Theyre shocked when the site slows to a crawl or crashes altogether.
Even after a lengthy build process, it turns out theyre missing the infrastructure
to handle load spikes, fix bugs, and add features. Thats because they bought
hosting, a legacy service based on a static publishing model thats missing
many mission critical capabilities needed to power a modern website.
You chose Drupal to remain lean and agile. Shouldnt 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 buttonwithout DIY
servers or sysadmins.

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The bad and the good

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 youll never be the ROI hero for your Drupal website. Heres what to look
out for:

Top 5

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
couldnt stay on top of it. Or, the new developers you just brought in for a site
refresh are constantly requesting SSH keys and passwords. Youve 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

control is difficult. Everyone is afraid of crashing the site because theres no
safe, reliable 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 theres 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.
Thats because traditional hosting alone doesnt 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 its powered by traditional hosting:

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Challenge #1

Site updates are cumbersome

and high-risk.
Managing Drupal over the lifecycle of a website requires workflow toolsnot
just production servers. Professional Drupal developers need to follow bestpractices 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.

Challenge #2

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. Nextgeneration tools like Redis and Varnish are essential, and every layer requires
its own specific configuration. Hosting doesnt provide this kind of expertise and
management, and high-performance Drupal consultants come at a premium.

Challenge #3

Server configurations in
production environments
dont always mirror those in
development or test.
When people develop on their local machines, they dont typically have every
layer of the stack. New problems emerge when the site goes live. The site was
well designed, but configurations werent correct in the production environment.
The site crashes.

Challenge #4

Scaling is manual and complex.

If you need to drive a lot of unique pages, youre bound to outgrow your server.
What next? You might upsize a VPS, but thats risky, messy, and guaranteed to
introduce downtime. You could move from a VPS to a cluster, but now youve
introduced a major architectural change: a remote database and a networked
filesystem. 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? Its a risky, manual, complex process.

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Traditional

Traditional Hosting Solutions

Theres 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
dont know what you dont know? Heres
what many site owners wish they had known
about traditional hosting solutionsbefore
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 isnt related to
the server itself? Youre on your own. Development tools, deployment workflows, performance optimization, help with scaling these arent available.

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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 cant 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
dont 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 its too unreliable and
underpowered for professional use cases. These servers also lack developer
tools, and arent 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.

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?
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The Difference

The Pantheon Difference

Introducing an All-in-One Drupal
Platform with Web-Scale Architecture
Your website itself is unique, but the infrastructure behind it probably isnt. A new,
all-in-one Drupal platform eases the burden for managing a high-performance
website, without incurring additional costs in system administration.

Amazing Website

Amazing Website

Amazing Website

Scaling

Scaling

Scaling

Dev Tools & Workflow

Dev Tools & Workflow

Dev Tools & Workflow

Operating System

Operating System

Operating System

Hardware

Hardware

Hardware

Your Focus

DIY Hosting

Resolved

Managed Hosting

Pantheon is an all-in-one cloud-based platform for development and production

that turns site owners into ROI heroes.

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Get more

Get more from your developers

with lessusing 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 & 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.

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Stay safe with hands-free security

& control.

Get more

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 Pantheons 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 whats important.
24/7 emergency uptime support and site monitoring
SLA guaranteed uptime

2h

Unlimited support tickets, with two hour response time during business hours
Managed scaling and traffic planning
Enterprise site launch service

Single point
of contact
until go - live

Importing
site onto
Pantheon

Detailed
site audit

Platform
training

Load
testing

Performance
Tuning

Freshen up with one- click Drupal

core updates.
New release of Drupal? No problem. One click and youre current.

Developers can claim their free Pantheon account at

www.getpantheon.com
Invite your development team in seconds.
Pantheons power tools and best-practice workflows
are free to use for as long as your site is in development. After you launch,
monthly pricing starts at $25.

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5
Questions to Answer

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 its 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 caching, 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 manage 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 sites 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 doesnt 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. Whats our plan to scale

resources if we need to, and
do we have high availability
in place to ensure uptime?

Why it matters: You never know when a viral traffic spike will occur, flooding
your site with millions of visitors. When that happens, one server wont be
enough. Having a plan to scale up when you need to keeps your time in the
spotlight from being wasted on an error message.

7. How can backups be

automated and stored
offsite?

Why it matters: Hard drives on servers can fail, causing catastrophic data loss.
Your data must be automatically backed up offsite every day. Play the odds
and run the risk of permanent data loss.

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Budgeting

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.
Hours

Item

(Minimum estimates
for a typical website.
Complex sites require
additional hours.)

Cost with Traditional

Hosting

(Based on $125 hourly rate for

Drupal system administrator)

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

One-Time Savings:
Ongoing Monthly Cost to
Manage DIY Hosting for a
Typical Website

Cost
with Pantheon

Hours

Item
Ongoing Server
and Software
maintenance
Development
Infrastructure
Total Monthly

Not including monthly

production hosting cost

Cost with Traditional

Hosting

$25,000 or more
Cost
with Pantheon

(Minimum estimates
for a typical website.
Complex sites require
additional hours.)

(Based on $125 hourly rate for

Drupal system administrator)

5 - 10

$625 - $1,250

Cost Included

$500 - $2,000

Cost Included

$1,125 - $3,250

Free

Monthly Savings: $1,125 - $3,250 or more

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In Action

Pantheon in Action
What developers are saying:
Our development shop used to spend a lot of resources on operational things,
like setting up the development server, edge caching, and the actual production
environment; plus installing modules and doing configurations. But the big one
was monitoring the performance of the site. It wasnt our core skillset. It was
hard to stay on schedule, because a server emergency could interrupt us at
any time. You cant tell your client to wait. You drop what youre doing and you
deal with it right there. The biggest benefit to us as developers is not having to
be on the hook for our clients hosting. We dont get woken up in the middle of
the night if a site goes down. Pantheon takes care of it. The other major benefit
is the development tools. Pantheon automates all the busywork we used to
do manually. I love how easy it is to pull down a copy of the dev site to run on
your local machine, and to push code out & deploy. I really dont worry about
it crashing in the middle of the night. In a hurricane, I know Pantheon is going
to be on it in a way that I never could be with my custom clusters. Making one
payment to Pantheon is a much better deal for our clients, too--both financially
and for their performance.
Matt Johnson, Managing Partner & Co-Founder, Alley Interactive
I switched all my clients over to Pantheon immediately. If you itemize the
costs for a customer to pay for systems architecture, failures, system software
updates, and performance tweaks it would be tens of thousands of dollars of
consulting work. This is all specialized work, and Pantheon is now doing it for
them in software, without any upfront expense or time wasted that could otherwise be spent on their actual website. Pantheon lets us scale as a firm. I dont
have to spend all my time being a sysadmin. I can support clients and provide
infinitely better customer service. Were much more responsive in terms of
building new things and addressing bugs. Were allowed to be pure developers. I dont get many 4am fire drills anymore.
Kelly Bell, Founder, Gotham City Drupal

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In Action

Pantheon in Action
My project management life was in shambles before I found Pantheon. Their
entire setup puts your team in a position to succeed during development. From
Git version control, to staging for client testing and sign off, to going live for
your sites large audience. Spinning up smaller websites is also a snap. Ive
been the e-genius to groups who needed a quick, inexpensive solution for
their online goals. In fact, if youre using anything besides Pantheon, youre
wasting time.
Andrew Ward, CCO and Co-Founder, Kalamuna

Conclusion

Conclusion
Pantheons all-in-one platform runs tens of thousands of sites serving over
100 million requests daily for customers like Kendall Jackson Wines, NBC
Universal, & UC Berkeley. Theyre 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.

Claim your free account

and invite your developers to speed their development workflow at
www.getpantheon.com.

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