Posted by bowersox on August 19, 2014 at 5:08pm
Do you know any universities that are doing a good job at hosting Drupal sites well, either in-house or with off-campus hosting/PaaS providers?
We are looking for examples of universities doing a great job at hosting numerous Drupal sites for campus units. Ideally, we want to find case studies of universities that provide support for units to easily deploy, launch and maintain Drupal and/or WordPress sites. It's fine if universities are doing this on-campus with their own staff or off-campus providers. We want to find top examples of each that are working best.
What universities are doing a great job at Drupal hosting? Please reply with any good examples or case studies.
Comments
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is currently hosting over 100 sites on our internal infrastructure.
George Washington University
George Washington University is running close to 300 production sites running on our in-house servers. We call it the GW Drupal cookie factory. I did a poster presentation at Educause last year - http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2013/turning-open-source-its-s...
Stanford
We have 1400+ on internal servers at Stanford. We participated in a panel discussion at DrupalCon Austin about scaling Drupal for Higher Ed:
https://austin2014.drupal.org/session/scaling-drupal-higher-ed-institutions
Yes I do!
We're a design / dev firm (www.blackantelope.com) that specializes in Drupal, and we happen to do a lot of EDU projects. We're not in the hosting biz so we team up with Drupal-specific hosting platforms that make it easier for us to focus on what we do best. There's a lot you can accomplish with Aegir or rolling your own deployment scripts, but that's all a ton of work to maintain and also very expensive. The Drupal-specific platforms have incredible performance because all of the Varnish and DB caching integration, so everything is very streamlined and works out of the box.
UC Berkeley - A lot of the work we do is with UC Berkeley, and they have a relationship with Pantheon.
ASU has a relationship with Pantheon: https://www.getpantheon.com/blog/how-arizona-state-university-launching-...
Cornell has a relationship with Acquia: http://www.it.cornell.edu/services/hosting/acquia/
Princeton is on Acquia: https://drupal.princeton.edu/hosting-acquia
YaleSites
A colleague from HappyCog pointed out YaleSites: http://yalesites.yale.edu/
They run over 400 websites at Yale using Drupal. They appear to have a set of templates and modules as well as a training curriculum and support team. Impressive!
www.pixotech.com
UBC
The University of British Columbia has a web services team specialized in Drupal, including a centrally provisioned cluster to host multi-sites. The gallery shows a sample of the sites. I am not sure how many sites in total are hosted:
http://it.ubc.ca/services/web-servers-storage/websites/web-services-gallery
Jens
Oregon State
Not sure of their current setup, but Oregon State gave a pretty great talk on how they manage 1000+ Drupal sites internally at DrupalCon Portland, http://portland2013.drupal.org/session/how-oregon-state-university-manag....
KU Drupal Mandate
Wow. The University of Kansas Chancellor actually mandated that all units on campus use drupal!
http://cms.ku.edu/
www.pixotech.com
Platform comparison
I'd be interested if anybody has had experience with, and can elaborate on pros/cons for the hosted platforms including Acquia and Pantheon, vs managing multiple Drupal sites via Drush or Aegir.
I think that for a large university managing dozens, hundreds or even thousands of sites, one feature that could be really useful is having a common upstream for a collection of sites. I know that Pantheon has a product that facilitates this and it's called Pantheon One, but I don't know if there is equivalent functionality elsewhere.
Acquia Cloud Site Factory
Checkout Acquia Cloud Site Factory
http://www.acquia.com/products-services/acquia-cloud-site-factory
I saw a demo of it recently and maybe something you are looking for.
Canada
The main blocker for Canadian institutions is that most of the hosted platforms are physically located outside of Canada and that is prohibited by privacy laws that some institutions fall under. So these institutions don't really have a choice unless the hosting providers start offering data centers that meet those requirements...
Acquia vs. Pantheon
Hi Klezmer41,
Acquia hosts 400-450 university websites on our Cloud platform. This is three times the amount of higher education websites as the closest competitor for many reasons.
The most compelling reason and our key differentiator from any other company, is that we provide the support for Drupal itself. We will not only host the site but support and maintain it along the way and take care of everything necessary to ensure the school succeeds with Drupal. When a site goes down, rather than do what most other companies do which is say it's an issue with the core or another factor, we'll personally dive into the issue, figure out exactly what's wrong and make sure it gets fixed.
Different schools have different levels of Drupal expertise, some may have a huge team and some may have a couple of people. This is why our hosting is so popular in the higher education space because those schools that have smaller teams can trust in not only receiving hosting but also support.
On another note, Acquia is the only Cloud Platform that is specifically tuned for just Drupal. We realize this is a niche with many different CMS options out there, but that's what makes us the best at it. Drupal is our focus at all times.
Acquia Site Factory is the product. We use it for Warner Music to create hundreds of artist sites.
I work for the higher education team at Acquia so feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
Laura.Caraker@acquia.com
Laura Caraker
Higher Education Drupal Solutions at Acquia
Hi Bowersox,There are
Hi Bowersox,
There are several schools that host hundreds of sites on the Acquia Cloud platform successfully.
Feel free to reach out personally with any questions you may have
Laura.Caraker@acquia.com
Laura Caraker
Higher Education Drupal Solutions at Acquia
As long as we're promoting our platforms ;)
We've done a lot with Universities at Pantheon. Our platform is particularly well-suited to the "federated" type of use case where a common core of design/functionality — e.g. a University theme and single sign-on module — needs to be shared across all sites, but individual departments and programs may still want to customize and do their own development.
Case studies that are relevant:
https://www.getpantheon.com/blog/how-arizona-state-university-launching-...
https://www.getpantheon.com/news/pantheon-panopoly-and-open-academy-berk...
A big list of more examples:
https://www.getpantheon.com/education
Happy to chat with anyone looking to make Drupal work for Higher Ed. It's a great fit.
https://pantheon.io | http://www.chapterthree.com | https://www.outlandishjosh.com