I CANT BELIEVE ITS

NOT MULTISITE!
SIX COMPANIES SHARE HOW THEYRE LAUNCHING &
RUNNING MORE WEBSITES THAN EVER BY LEAVING
MULTISITE BEHIND.

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LAUNCHING AND MANAGING

MANY SITES?
NO ONE CAN DENY THE RICH, BUTTERY APPEAL OF MULTISITE.
Run everything from a single codebase. Launch hundredseven thousandsof websites!
But lets be honest. Multisite isnt 100% good for you. Its unstable. Its not best-practice. It forces you
to make trade-offs in security, scalability, and the ability to customize. Worst of all, it leads to clogged
development teams. Time meant for new sites and features goes to fixing bugs instead. Regressions
pop up from out of nowhere. A traffic spike to one site kills the whole server. A security vulnerability
slips through, putting the entire network at risk. Its always something with Multisite.
Yes, its tempting to write once and deploy everywhere. But is Multisite really worth it?
Now theres an alternative that tastes like Multisite, but with zero of Multisites problems.
In this eBook, six companies share, in their own words, how theyre launching and running more
websites than ever by leaving Multisite behind.
Josh Koenig, Head of Developer Experience / Co-Founder

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I CANT BELIEVE ITS NOT MULTISITE

Youll learn:

1. HOW TO ADD A SUBSCRIPTION REVENUE STREAM

TO A SERVICE BUSINESS.
Learn how Fullcube is cutting 70+ hours of developer time a month while
growing its subscription business for 20+ behind-the-paywall websites.

2. WHY YOU REALLY CAN HAVE IT ALL

WHEN IT COMES TO UX.
Got a multitude of use cases and departments? So did Weill Cornell Medical
College. See how they reduced digital sprawl by ensuring a consistent user
experience and designwhile also allowing customizations.

3. THE CASE FOR MANAGING AN ENTIRE AGENCY

ON ONE PLATFORM.
See how Kalamuna is saving ~2 hours on each initial project spinup, resolving
tickets 50% more efficiently than before, and freeing top developers to focus on
problems that make more sense to them.

4. HOW TO GET UNSOLICITED COMPLIMENTS

FROM STAKEHOLDERS.
The tech team at Arizona State University earned praise by deploying a custom
distribution for 2,000+ sites, freeing up 2-3 full-time employees.

5. WHY NONPROFITS INSIST ON SHARING

RESOURCESBUT NOT CODEBASES.
See how the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers saved 100+
developer hours by launching 17 websites on one distribution.

6. 3 REASONS MULTISITE ISNT AS AWESOME AS IT LOOKS.

Multisite looks great on paper. Launch from one codebasewhat could go
wrong? See why California State University opted out of Multisite, and how they
saved their team 40 hours a week with faster workflows.
This is required reading for anyone who needs to launch and manage many sites.
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FULLCUBE
HOW TO GROW A PAAS BUSINESS BY FAST-TRACKING PRIVATE MARKETPLACES
David Hickson is the President and CEO of Fullcube, a agency that develops private marketplace technology for
high affinity sports, entertainment and publishing brands. The Fullcube platform enables behind-the-login relationships with clients most valuable customers and audiences. Programs may include a deals and discounts engine,
VIP event inventory and registration, and on-the-fly microsites for consumer segments.

WE BUILD PRIVATE MARKETPLACES FOR A BRANDS BEST CUSTOMERS

Fullcube is both a service company and a technology company. Based on a Drupal distribution, our
Private Marketplace platform powers more than 20 private, member-based marketplaces for high-affinity brands like sports teams, entertainment properties, and publishers.
For example, when magazine publisher Source Interlink launches a behind-the-login website for Hot
Rod Magazine, customers get even more value than what they receive in printed magazines, while
advertisers get a direct-to-consumer private channel to sell exclusive products and services.

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Fullcubes Private Marketplace also gives brands a toolset to offer members-only experiential
opportunities and curated content to their best customers across the country.
BEFORE PANTHEON ONE: BESPOKE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR BIG BRANDS
Infrastructure management was pulling us away from our core competency. Our Drupal team had
developed a Multisite/Aegir/Drush setup, so everything was built off of that base installation. But we
still needed to recreate the infrastructure for each client.
Heres a breakdown of the time required by our team for the most common tasks:
Site Setup: 5-10 Hours For Lead Developer. Anytime we spun up a new site, our lead developer
would need to manually set up all the SSLs, get a slide of the server, and spin up a new installation.
This took 5 to 10 hours for each new private marketplace site.

At one point, an update to one site took down another site. Multisite wasnt robust
enough for our needs.
Site Updates: 20-30 hours a month for lead developer. As the number of private marketplace
sites on our Multisite/Aegir/Drush setup increased, so did the complexity of pushing out feature and
theming updates. Initially, it only took 15- 20 minutes to push feature releases to 4 sites. With many
sites, we were looking at approximately 30 hours total for each new feature. At one point, an update
to one site took down another site. Multisite wasnt robust enough for our needs.
Time to Market: 60 to 90 days. In the old days, the time from contract signed to market ranged
from 60 to 90 days, based on how much custom development and how many upgrades to the
front and back ends were needed. Things took even longer when an important prospective client
was on the line. If we needed to do a site spinup for a demo, wed need to stop our sprint, take our
most valuable lead developer off of the project, get the sysadmin, and have them spin up the site.
Our ability to launch new private marketplace sites slowed down quite a bit because the team that
managed site spinups was the same team that managed our product and feature development for
the Drupal sites themselves.
Sysadmin Time: 40 hours a month. The time we spent on site deployment and sprint releases per
month, in server admin time alone, totaled more than 40 hours per month, assuming no unforeseen
circumstances.
Site Deployment: 10-15 hours for lead developer. Each site deployment took 10-15 hours of our
lead developers time.

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WHY PANTHEON ONE?

Aegir/Drush/Multisite was a known quantity. But our Drupal partners at SystemSeed had recently
completed multiple major migrations with Pantheon. We decided to lean on them, since theyd
already been through the onboarding and migration process, and had operationalized how to do this
effectively for big brands. Their confidence reassured us.
HOW TO MIGRATE 8 SITES, SANS MIGRAINES
Choose an experienced partner. Pantheons Launch Team was instrumental in ensuring we were
prepped and ready for our migration. However, as a risk-averse organization, we wanted to ensure
we went through the due diligence necessary from all angles. We chose SystemSeed as a Drupal
partner because they had experience handling enterpise-level environments, and had successfully
migrated numerous high-visibility sites to Pantheon One. This proved to be key to the success of our
migration/launch project.
Test in advance. Obviously, anytime you migrate a site to a new platform, youre very concerned
about losing content and user accounts. We also worried about losing our own customer support
capabilities, like recurring billing and fulfillment. These are all part of a back end system that integrates with Drupal on the front end. So we ran multiple tests. We created testing sites on the old
platform and on our back end, and then migrated them over. We spun up a new site on the new
Pantheon platform and tested that, as well. The Launch Team offered a valuable, independent
perspective by looking at every scenario. Pantheon thoroughly tested our platform before we even
started the staging site migrations.

So far, weve migrated 8 customers. In 2014, we expect to onboard another 20 private

marketplace clients to Pantheon.
Migrate in the morning. The migration process itself took no time at all. The private marketplace site for NASCAR, one of our largest clients, migrated in under an hour, including all past user
accounts and content created since 2004. After that, we migrated 7 more clients, doing each migration first thing in the morning to minimize client impact. So far, weve migrated 8 customers. In 2014,
we expect to onboard another 20 private marketplace clients to Pantheon.
Load Test For Your Largest Site. To keep traffic spikes from causing problems, we took the advice
of SystemSeed. After identifying the highest load times for our largest private marketplace site, we
had Pantheon Launch team do the load testing. They went a bit above-and-beyond in their preparation. Pantheon ensured our infrastructure would adapt with the sites.

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AFTER PANTHEON ONE: MEET OUR NEW DRUPAL DISTRIBUTION

Here are 4 results were getting from our new Drupal distribution, which runs on Pantheon One.
1. Faster Time To Market.
CENTRAL HUB FOR RAPID ONBOARDING. The new Pantheon spin-up process affords us
the luxury of having one single interface for the non-technical onboarding of a private
marketplace. This streamlined process is a significant productivity gain for our team.
15-MINUTE SSL. SSL setup is no longer performed by our IT team. We can get set up, and
secure SSL in 15 minutes.
4-MINUTE SITE SPINUP. We can now have a development and testing private marketplace site up and running in as little as 4 minutes, depending on the features the client
requests.
SEPARATE ENVIRONMENTS. We have a true, enterprise-level Drupal workflow, with dev,
test, and live. The Pantheon UI and Multidev processes have only improved this workflow, and have freed our Drupal developers to solve real problems, while focusing less
on basic blocking and tackling.
2. More High-Value Features For Our Clients.
Pantheon frees up more of our resources to develop high-value features and functionality. Our
development team wears multiple hats, as they do with most lean organizations. If we can pull
them off of tasks that can be automated, they can focus all their time on core client needs. This also
happens to be more beneficial for their own personal growth. The system administration time can
now be applied to front end development. And if a new client requires custom development, now we
can onboard them quickly.

Consider Pantheon One if you want a turnkey way to spin up your platform for many
different brands, with easy replication and scaling.
3. SHARED RESOURCES. WHEN ONE CLIENT BENEFITS, ALL DO.
One of the benefits of using the Fullcube platform is we can provide a feature developed for one
client to all our other existing clients quickly, and in a way that isnt disruptive. Speaking of disruption,
the ability to deploy new features across common clients allows us to truly disrupt industries like
publishing and other high-affinity entertainment brands, which have similar needs.

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4. FASTER SALES CYCLE, HIGHER WIN RATE.

With very short notice, a non-technical person can spin up a demo thats customized for a brand.
The demo isnt necessarily a silver bullet for our business development process, but now that these
demos are easier for us to do, we are beginning to see higher close rates. With high-affinity brands,
marketing strategy and value propositions need to be discussed. Its nice to know we can get quickly
past the development phase and right into the core of how we can make the private marketplace
successful.
ADVICE TO ANOTHER AGENCY
Consider Pantheon One if you want a turnkey way to spin up your platform for many different
brands, with easy replication and scaling. It just makes sense for us to offload our infrastructure
management, free up resources, and easily push updates to all our sites.

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WEILL CORNELL MEDICAL COLLEGE

HOW TO BUILD A DREAM DISTRIBUTION WITHOUT MULTISITE

At Weill Cornell Medical College, Dan Dickinson manages a 12-person Web Communications team that
designs and develops organizational websites for medical education, research, and patient care. Read
how his team is rescuing 100+ websites from design anarchyby setting out to build the best Drupal
distribution in higher education.

DIAGNOSIS? AN ADVANCED CASE OF DIGITAL SPRAWL

100+ static websites running on various platforms. We had approximately 100 virtual hosts on
our production web cluster. Decisions over the years had gotten us an enterprise CMS (too big!) and
some lighter-weight CMSes (too small!). The departments who did want to rebuild their sites were
having their options limited by a need to maintain support for sites that hadnt been touched in years.
Need consistent user experiences and designs, STAT. Having a consistent user experience is
as important to us as whether or not the official university colors get worked into the design. The
buttons should work the same. The calls to action should be in the same place. The most common
actions should be easy to find. But because there werent any real boundaries for creating new sites,
there was a wide array of look-and-feel, branding, and other functional issues. We knew we needed a
better content management strategy.

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A differently-shaped site for every department. Even though were one institution, every department can have a unique focus. One site might focus exclusively on donors. Another focuses on
prospective students. Still others focus on existing students, research fellows, or collaborators
around the world. You cant design a website for 21 different audiencesit would kill the designers.
So each department needed its own, unique, differently-shaped site.
No consistent base design or framework for others to work from. Sometimes departments need
to hire external web agencies. Other departments want to build sites themselves. We wanted them
to be able to make progress, without us having to be there for every minute of the project.
SEEK CMS THERAPY IMMEDIATELY
After some market research in early 2012, we settled on Drupal and set a modest goal: to build the
best Drupal distribution in higher education.
WHY BUILD A CUSTOM DISTRIBUTION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION?
It includes most of the boilerplate work we need to include at any given site for our institutionlike web analytics, search integration, content types, email forms, navigation
elements, etc.
Its a toolkit full of parts we can switch on and off for various sites and departments.
Its bundled up so we avoid doing most of the repetitive work or trying to find the right
modules as we go.
It accelerates our production work significantly.
WHY PANTHEON? (MULTISITE VS. MULTI-INSTALL)
Once we chose Drupal for a CMS, we had to decide whether to go with Multisite or multi-install.
Multisite would minimize the number of installations, but it would also require us to build a lot of
infrastructure and bureaucracy internally. We would spend as much time managing Multisite installs
as we would spend making websites.
We needed to start to standardize site form and function, while driving down our implementation
times (and eventual cost to departments), but without train-wrecking our project lifecycle. Multi-install would allow us to do all these things by keeping it to one site per codebase. Thats a big part of
why we chose Pantheon.

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PROGNOSIS: A FULL RECOVERY WITH CUSTOM DRUPAL DISTRIBUTION AND PANTHEON.

So far, weve launched five sites on the distribution, with more constantly on the way. Weve also had
some outside vendors working on it. Even though were still pretty early into the process, here are
some of the first results were seeing:

First project comes in under budget (& on time). Even though the first project to switch to the
Drupal distribution was mid-cycle in development, we saw savings in billable hours for the client. The
typical rush of last-minute change requests didnt happen this time.
Freedom from design anarchy. When our team is asked to create a new site, now theres a consistent start state to work from and build customizations on top of. We can have tons of Drupal sites
with different shapes that still function in the same manner. So were starting to get both consistency and flexibility. If one department wants a vanilla site while another needs a bunch of contrib
modules installed, we can handle that.

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Customers love it. Most of the departments who have seen the distribution love it. They like
knowing the base legwork is already done, so they dont have to sweat it. In site builds, we always
spent a lot of time going from design concepts to workable betas people could click around on. The
sooner we get there, the better. Its much easier to speak a common language with a client. They can
focus on what will make the site special, rather than things like, where does the call to action go?

With Pantheon, I dont need a Powerpoint presentation to explain how the pricing
works. Its simple and very straightforward.
Customers say yes to our pricing model, too. With Pantheon, I dont need a Powerpoint presentation to explain how the pricing works. Its simple and very straightforward. This is your website.
We expect this much traffic. It costs you X. Were not subdividing shared servers or trying to pair
departments together into multi-site installs.
Lets the right ones in. The multi-install model helps with the provisioning and permissioning
for outside agencies and others. When outside vendors finish a project, were not doing anything
different to have the site go live: our platform becomes their platform. When they leave at the end
of the project, were not left with foreign infrastructure that takes a lot of effort to debug and maintain. And anyone at Weill Cornell can sign up for a Pantheon account and spin up a site using our
distribution.
Our teamand more importantly, our internal clientsare happy with our push to use Drupal and
a custom distribution at the heart of our future web strategy. Were already seeing a good return on
the time invested, and expect to see more over the coming years as we keep moving Weill Cornell
onto Drupal.
THINKING OF BUILDING YOUR OWN CUSTOM DISTRIBUTION?
Here are some tips and best practices to anyone else whos considering multi-install to manage their
educational websites:
Budget, compliance, speed? Whats at the top of your list? Some schools are very budget-conscious. Others have very strict security and compliance requirements. So ask yourself: what
matters to you? Do you have one mammoth site, or a lot of smaller sites? Do you have compliance concerns? Is your web development cost-recovery or centrally funded? All of these factors are
important requirements that will drive your development. Set these priorities for yourself, before
you start touching any lines of code.

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How can you give departments what they already want, and what they want in the future?
A vision for the future is great, but you also need an honest look at how the web at your institution
operates in the present. Often, techy people get hung up about what we want an idealized future to
look like. But getting to that future point isnt about working off of a giant technical list and a work-effort
list. Its also a political and cultural shift. Business units can react badly if you suddenly change the
rules on them. We needed something that fit our current model as to how our web ecosystem operated,
so that we did not add unnecessary stress as we build towards the future.
Insist on kicking the tires. Its nice to have Directors and C-level executives in meetings with vendors,
seeing best-case WebEx demos. But if youre only seeing a tool when a vendor shows it to you, you
cant really get a sense for it. The key for any technology evaluation is being able to kick the tires.
Signing our team up for free accounts with Pantheon helped tremendously in our decision process.
Take an honest look at your teams capacity. Its hard to do it all - and its better to focus your
energy on the things that make your institution unique, rather than conquering problems that others
have tackled before. For us, we saw a lot of value in not building a new stack of in-house infrastructure. By partnering with Pantheon, we get to spend our time working in Drupal, rather than
spending precious time procuring servers.

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KALAMUNA
HOW AUTOMATION CAN LIBERATE DEVELOPERS AND EMPOWER NEWBIES
Mike Pirog co-founded Kalamuna, an Oakland, CA web agency focused on empowering organizations
and individuals with easy-to-use websites and products. In addition to building great websites, Kalamuna is also building a team of rule-breakers who want to change the way web development is done.

DRUPAL FOR THE FEW?

While Squarespace and WordPress allow you to spin up a reasonably functional website in just a
few clicks, Drupal isnt so easy. If you want to see a website, youll need to hire an agency like ours
to do some prototyping. This extra step gives Drupal a pretty big barrier to entry. There are only so
many Drupal developers to go around. At Kalamuna, we believe Drupals destiny lies in lowering this
barrier to entry and empowering newcomers. Thats what we try to do.
PRODUCTS SIMPLE ENOUGH FOR ANYONE, POWERFUL ENOUGH FOR DRUPAL PROS
Most Drupal products are designed to give other developers a kickstart. At Kalamuna, we believe
Drupal products should grow the community. We build fully-baked products simple enough for
anyone to use right out of the box, but powerful enough for us to use internally.

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You can download Kalabox and set up a modern web server with Drupal power tools and a native
Linux machine. Users dont even need to know what Linux means. Just click the button, and it works.
We have been using Pantheon to build products like these, as well as to build and manage our
clients websites.

Now Pantheon One for Agencies allows us to scale our own client service as well.
SPINNING UP SITES WITH PANTHEON ONE
For example, building turnkey distributions is one of our areas of expertise. Weve been using
Pantheon One to allow clients like Arizona State University to easily spin up similar-use-case sites.
ASU WebSpark is a quick and easy way to spin up an ASU-branded Drupal site. WebSpark sites are
responsive and mobile-ready out-of-the-box, featuring a number of style options and tools to make
layout and content creation a breeze.
Were already using Pantheon One to allow clients to scale their website development efforts. Now
Pantheon One for Agencies allows us to scale our own client service as well.
Heres how we used to do things before automation saved the day:
BEFORE AUTOMATION:
Minor updates required excessive force. For most of our support clients, keeping websites up-todate used to mean going into each website, one by one. This required a reasonably competent
developer, and took 1-2 hours. As you can imagine, good developers would rather be doing other
things. Worst-case scenario, something breaks. The update pathways dont work. Then youre looking
at 10, 20, even 30 hours. It doesnt make any sense to have a good developer go in and click a button.
2-Hour fix. Multiply by 20 sites. In the past, Ive spent 1-2 hours fixing something on one clients
site, then having to repeat the process all over again for every other client site. If you do this for 20
sites, thats up to 40 hours for one simple fix.
Spinning up new sites took too long, even with a distribution. Before, we would instantiate a
Panopoly project and connect to our feature server, which involved 2-4 hours of setup time. Cashstrapped clients cant afford to pay us to do that.
Support was pretty good, not OMG!!! Clients need two kinds of support. Updates to make them
feel safe, and emergency fixes: Ive lost my mind, and need to have this fixed right away! For our
most basic support offering, we used to spend the vast majority of our time making clients feel safe

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Continued from previous page...

with system and security updates. Thats fine, but its not going to make them fall out of their chairs
with gratitude and excitement. We want to focus our support hours on things clients can see and
touch, not on things with less perceived value, like security updates.
AFTER PANTHEON ONE FOR AGENCIES
After a couple weeks of daily use, we decided to move all our clients (about 30 sites) and people
over to Pantheon One for Agencies. Standardizing on Pantheon allows us to give clients ridiculously
awesome support, without chaining good developers to their desks.

More importantly, anyone at Kalamuna can do thisnot just our developers.

Heres how:
Standardizing = faster time to market. Were saving about 2 hours on each initial project spinup,
thanks to the starter kit we can keep on Pantheon. Our common codebase applies to 95% of our
sites, and includes lots of apps. The more we refine, the more we save and can do awesome things.
We use Panopoly and extend that with Kalatheme, another easy-to-use and powerful Kalaproduct.
We save tons of money on these normal tasks, so we can focus on that extra little piece that makes a
project different and special. The savings will increase as we build it out.
The workflow is nice. You can instantiate our Kalamuna base distribution, a Panopoly subdistro and
burgeoning Drupal.org distribution called HotSauce! Then you go through the install profile, clicking
the features and the theme you want to have. That saves time later in the project. It also allows us
to do instant prototyping for clients, turning high-level specs into a prototype within 3-4 hours. More
importantly, anyone at Kalamuna can do thisnot just our developers. Thats a huge value add.
OMG! Support, no advanced developers needed. This one-click update functionality make our
lower-level support 50% more efficient than before. One person can support 20 clients now, instead of
just 10. Many tickets concern common problems that are shared by clients on our base distribution.
Whenever we see a support request thats an auto-update, it gets kicked to one of the five people
who didnt used to do that sort of thing. People who dont have solid levels of technical competence
can go in and click the button. Its really fast. If it fails, they tag it for escalation to an actual developer.
It really makes the workflow better and more efficient, presenting huge savings for us. Because our
lower support is so efficient, were now able to quickly resolve the support tickets that matter most
to our clients on a day-to-day basis. Were resolving these mid- to higher-level tickets 15% faster.

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Update to the 10th power. Because were standardized on the Pantheon platform, a fix for one
client often improves the other clients websites, too. As we make improvements to the base starter
kit, everyone benefits.
Frees up our developers. I think the biggest value isnt in how much time were saving, but in whose
time were saving. Now we can send out an email to anyone whos available to do a one-click update.
This frees up our mid-level and advanced developers to focus on problems that make more sense
to them. Not only does this make our team happier, but it also gives us a pathway to bring in other
junior people, so they can get a feel for Drupal. Even project managers can step in.
ADVICE TO OTHER AGENCIES
If you care about doing great work, then you also care about saving money on repeatable
things. Good clients hate inefficiencies just as much as we do. Standardizing saves you money
so you can focus on things that make your work great. Thats the most valuable thing about
Pantheon One for Agencies.

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ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

HOW TO LAUNCH 2,000+ BRANDED, TURNKEY SITESWITHOUT MULTISITE
In this guest post, the central IT web development and hosting team at Arizona State University
shares how theyre transitioning 2,000+ sites from self-hosting to Pantheon One. From the University
Technology Office (UTO), Daniel Garcia-Mont, Web Application Developer Lead; Ron Page, Sr Director,
Applications & Design; and Ryan Clemens, Director, Web Applications share their story.

SITUATION: 2,000+ SITES, HOSTED & SUPPORTED BY ASU

Everyone here at the University Technology Office is a Drupal advocate. Of more than 2,000 departmental, faculty, and personal sites hosted for free by the UTO, approximately half (1,100) are Drupal
installations. Its always been easy for ASU employees to request a new site. In the beginning, even
students could get them. Quite a few of these sites now sit abandoned.
THE CHALLENGES OF HOSTING ON OUR OWN ENVIRONMENT
Not scalable. With dozens of virtual machines, each hosting 80 to 100 sites, the system was never
meant to handle high-traffic situations. A few years ago, President Obama came to our commencement. As soon as he started speaking, the ASU news site crashed. So did every other site on that

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host. After that, we built a dedicated rig for the high-traffic library and the news site. The web hosting
service still took 2-3 full-time employees to maintain.
Security issues. Sites werent being kept up to date, so there were lots of vulnerabilities. Drupal was
too complex for a non-developer to maintain. People would switch over to WordPress and their sites
would get hacked.
Support demand > supply. It was in our best interests to get out of the hosting business. Each
department is responsible for maintaining their sites, fixing vulnerabilities, and paying for development. But in real life, people call central IT when they need help. We help when we can, but we are
not staffed to give people the kind of service they ask for.
CHOOSING A FOCUS: DRUPAL
So many customers, so many needs. We got caught up in analysis paralysis at first, as we tried to find
a hosting solution for all the different technologies of web sites.
In a moment of clarity, we decided to start with Drupal. After all, UTO had already standardized on
Drupal as a development/CMS platform. We reasoned that finding a great solution for our Drupal
customers would be the best starting point for meeting others needs, too. This helped us focus our
requirements and limit the scope.
EVALUATING THE OPTIONS FOR A DRUPAL HOSTING SOLUTION
In evaluating our options, a few factors were most important to us. They turned out to be the
reasons why we chose Pantheon:
A turnkey solution. A lot of our requirements come from Drupal newbies. We needed to make it
easy for them to get started. Pantheon provided a customized Drupal start state, called Open ASU,
that makes it easy for non-developers to build Drupal sites.
Easy to maintain. The original goal of providing web hosting for the university was to get people
to stop hosting their own servers under their desks or in utility closets. With centralization we
succeeded in keeping the O/S up to date, but we found that many of our customers did not keep
Drupal up to date. Pantheon makes it easy for customers to keep their Drupal sites patched and
secure.
Single sign on, out of the box. Pantheon was the only solution that could provide basic-level sites
that came with integrated SSL and SSO out of the box, without relying on third-party modules.

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A cost-effective way for us to ramp up. We still needed to transition all 1,100 sites away from
self-hosting, so we needed a cost-effective way to ramp up. Pantheon gave us a path. We could start
slow, without paying large amounts up front. That was a big help.
THE SOLUTION: ASU-BRANDED SITES OUT OF THE BOX.
Open ASU gives you a responsive, ASU-branded site out of the box. Weve been calling it the WordPress killer. Now an entry-level person can flip through a couple options and spin up a turnkey
website. They dont need extra funds or technical knowledge.
Keeping sites up to date is easy, too. Before, youd need to be a Drupal developer. Now, we maintain
the distribution. You just make one click through the Pantheon dashboard and youre up to date

PUTTING PANTHEON ONE TO THE TEST: A REAL-LIFE FIRE DRILL.

Last Friday, our housing site came under so much traffic that our environment couldnt handle it. We
decided to switch that site over to Pantheon. It took about 15 minutes. Since this was an older site,
there was some additional work to get the branding working and looking the way it needed to.
Pantheons dev-test-live workflow really helped us out. We also liked the one-click ability to move
up and down between plan levels so we could meet the temporary traffic spikes that happen once
a semester. Plus, the New Relic add-on is now giving us info about the sites performance that we
didnt have before.
ANY CHALLENGES WITH IMPLEMENTATION?
Moving to Pantheon is a bit of a double-edged sword, because it forces developers to work in a more
enterprise environment. New things can be scary to novice developers. But in the long run, it will be
good to start enforcing these workflows throughout the University.

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Some novices were used to going in and manually making live changes to a production server via an
FTP client like Dreamweaver. They were set in their workflows and didnt want to learn a new one.
But once they started using Pantheons tools, most of them came around.
With Pantheon, you have a dev, test, live environment, and all the tools that come with it. The real
Drupal developers on campus saw that as awesome. With one click, they could set up all these
environments.
SURPRISERESPONSIVE SERVICE.
Pantheon is a young company. Initially, we feared they might not be quite ready for production.
While a few small things have come up, Pantheons commitment to the customer and to making
things right has really stood out. Theyre pretty hands-on when working to meet our needs. We
werent given a cookie-cutter solution.
PANTHEON ONE DOES THE WORK OF 2-3 FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES.
Were still working to deliver the final distribution on time. But theres a light at the end of the tunnel.
When were finished, we expect to free up the equivalent of 2-3 full-time employees. The UTO
management is pretty excited to outsource a service that was never core. Now we can use more fulltime employees for things that are.
The more sites we can get on Pantheon, the less work we have to do on our current hosting service.
Its worth the effort.
Rather than helping people keep their sites running, well be able to concentrate on helping them
make effective websites.
WELL-RECEIVED BY OUR OWN DRUPAL COMMUNITY.
Our developers are universally excited. People actually came up and told us what a great decision
wed made. No one ever says that!

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THE FORUM OF REGIONAL

ASSOCIATIONS OF GRANTMAKERS
LAUNCHING 17 DRUPAL WEBSITES ON A SINGLE DISTRIBUTION. NO MULTISITE.
In this guest post, Sean Larkin shares how he and the ThinkShout team developed and launched an
integrated CMS/CRM solution for The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers.

THE CHALLENGE: TO BUILD A FLEXIBLE, INTEGRATED CMS & CRM

The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, a national network that supports and
strengthens regional associations in their promotion of effective philanthropy to improve lives in
their communities, consists of 34 geographically-based professional associations, each staffed by
one to twenty+ people. Seventeen associations share a common technology platform. The Forum
wanted to move away from a very custom content management solution and CRM to something
more open and flexible.
The associations chose Drupal for CMS, Salesforce for CRM, and ThinkShout to build the distribution,
including the integration code for syncing Drupal with Salesforce. (Jackson River developed the Salesforce managed package.)

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WHY WE CONSIDERED DRUPAL MULTISITEBUT ADVISED AGAINST IT

Initially, we did consider going with Multisite. Two things kept us from recommending it for this
particular client:
Hard to customize. All 17 websites would be using the same codebase. Its hard to manage that
many customizations, and to pull in customizations across that many websites.
Risky to update. Things can become quite fragile with Multisite, even in testing. If you screw up, you
can take down 17 websites with just one click.
Ultimately, we recommended the Pantheon One platform.
WHY PANTHEON ONE?
We recommended Pantheon One for a few reasons:
One shared distribution. Pantheon is the only solution that allows a network of nonprofits to roll
out a shared Drupal distribution. There are other ways to deploy and manage multiple websites
running on a shared distributionAegir, for example, but Aegir can be difficult to deploy and maintain. Pantheons managed distribution tools are unbelievable. Without Pantheon One, wed need to do
another 100 hours of custom development operations. Theres nothing else on the market like it, period.

The out-of-the-box performance is really high compared to other offerings. Also, the
pricing is significantly more competitive.
Ease of updates and spinning up new sites. Its also easy to merge specific distribution updates
with custom work on a given instance.
High value. The out-of-the-box performance is really high compared to other offerings. Also, the
pricing is significantly more competitive. The total cost of ownership on these sites is lower, too,
because of the infrastructure Pantheon provides. I tell my clients they cant just look at line items
when theyre evaluating their options. They have to look at how it reduces development costs and
streamlines support over time.
Responsive service. Pantheon One comes with a top-notch service level agreement. Other
providers dont always respond if youre not on their highest-level plan. Ive noticed that Pantheon
treats their nonprofit clients the exact same way they treat everyone else. Theyve always been
accessible and open to our feedback.

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Easier to customize. As a development shop, our goal is to build really custom, beautiful sites that
are unique to each client. Because we have a lower-level feature set, all our clients need customizations, and we need Pantheon One. Pantheon One allows us to easily merge new features and custom
code in and out. Its better than anything else out there.
THE SOLUTION
An out-of-the-box drupal distribution. We built a robust Drupal distribution offering significant
functionality out of the box to every regional association, significantly reducing customization costs.
Now each regional association has a common starting point and feature set, which can be extended
to meet any unique needs.
Salesforce integration. Anyone with site-building skills can sync any Salesforce object with any
Drupal entity. The distribution has a starting point for mappings, which are easy to change and
customize. If an association wants to use the tools in its shared Salesforce template, it can roll out
a version of the Salesforce package, spin up the distribution on Pantheon, then work with us or any
other vendor to customize the package. ThinkShout also released a completely new version of the
Salesforce integration suite for this project.

Having Pantheon allowed us to build a distributed resource library so each regional

association can share resources for grantmakers directly with their colleague associations.
A distributed resource library. Having Pantheon allowed us to build a distributed resource library
so each regional association can share resources for grantmakers directly with their colleague associations. The Forum anticipates a resource library of over 4,000 pieces of content that will grow over
time. Were using Apache Solr to index the content.
Most of the sites are in staging right now, while others are slated to launch within the next 3 to 6
months.
This fall, well also roll out a feature that lets associations create their own public and private
membership directory landing pageswithout having to write new code.
ANY HICCUPS?
Our client knew they were early adopters of Pantheon One, and they were the first non-developers to deploy sites on Pantheon One. There have been some bumps along the road, but its easy
to accept that things are new when Pantheon has such a high level of accountability. The team at

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Continued from previous page...

Pantheon has been very attentive to our feedback, and quick to make reasonable changes to the
platform to meet our clients needs.

Pantheon is the only tool that allows our clients to roll out websites one at a time by
themselves, without needing to rely on us for feature and site deployments.
THE OUTCOME: INNOVATION MADE SIMPLE
Pantheon is the only tool that allows our clients to roll out websites one at a time by themselves,
without needing to rely on us for feature and site deployments. If an association decides to launch, it
has all the tools in hand to do that, without touching any code. Thats pretty unique.
Each regional association can also manage its own customizations or pull in new innovations to give
back to its distribution. For example, three regional associations can team up to develop and build a
new feature, to be shared with all the other associations.
The Pantheon One architecture makes it easy for us to take the code that powers new features,
and roll it back into our distribution. Once were ready to push these changes upstream into the
Pantheon One git repository, regional association website managers can log in, pull down the new
functionality weve built, test it using Pantheons development workflow and tools, then deploy with
two clicks. The interfaces for managing the three environments are very intuitive. It was easy to train
our clients on how to manage code through the admin console.

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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY

18+ CAMPUSES. ONE DISTRIBUTION. ZERO MULTISITE.
This guest post by Kevin Miller, the web developer for California State University, Monterey Bay,
describes why his team adopted Pantheon One for a web application that is now used by a majority of
campuses in the California State University system.

WHY WE CREATED AN INTEGRATED WEB APPLICATION

Cal State Monterey Bay has a program called Service Learning, in which students do community work as
part of their academic program. We were taking a lot of legal risk in writing these projects. No one was
tracking where students were, or informing them of the risks. We were on the hook if they got injured.
So we built a platform to track thousands of volunteer opportunities, the student participants, the
courses, and the faculty. Students can sign in, read about risk information, discover opportunities,
place themselves, and provide emergency contact information. Campuses can also use the application to show the community data like, Our students are doing 20,000 hours of community service in
your zip code.

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18+ CAMPUSES. ONE DISTRIBUTION.

A few years ago, other campuses in the system came to us because there wasnt anything like what
we had in the marketplace. So we decided to take our existing application and rebuild it in Drupal
7 as an install profile. Initially, we were just going to release it. The code is open source. Other
campuses could just load and install it. But because it has a lot of data integrationbusiness process
mapping and other sorts of authentication has to happen beforehanda lot of campuses found
they couldnt just download and install it. So we decided to start hosting instances of this install
profile for our other sister campuses.
A STARTUP IN AN UNLIKELY PLACETHE STATE UNIVERSITY
We now maintain a single git repository thats a fork from our open source project. This fork gets
pushed to every single campus in the California State University system. Pantheon One powers that.
S4 is run by CSUMB in conjunction with the Center for Community Engagement in the Chancellors
Office. I like to say its a startup within the CSU system. The other campuses reimburse us for the
staffing and hosting, and we provide a single platform.
WHY MULTISITE WASNT THE ANSWER
At first I thought Multisite was awesome. I no longer had 15 different installs. I could just log in, add a
folder, create a new site, configure the file, and be on my way.
Time-intensive setups. The biggest problem was setting up environments for each campus. We
have to maintain each Multisite environment individually. Lots of kluge-y workflows. It took a full
monthfour 40-hour weeks of my timeto set up an environment that supported one-click deploys
and installs of our platform. We also needed to do things like spin up an instance for a campus, let
them play with it, and then take it offline two weeks later. We had lots of needs, but no infrastructure. It took up a lot of my teams time.
Messy code. Things got messy, fast. We might have two different projects in a Multisite install, each
needing a different version and a different contrib module. Youd need to go in and fix the paths and
the system table. It became difficult to debug. There were so many places things could be.
All-or-nothing updates. Were running an application for a variety of campuses with different needs
and deployment schedules. Multisite made it impossible to update them at different times. When it
comes to updating code, its all or nothing.

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WHY PANTHEON?
Staggered updates for each campus. Some campuses are very aggressive, and some are slower.
With Pantheon, its been nice to push updates in a staggered configuration. Were also running our
own internal test sites on top of this platform. We use a training site for other campuses, and a playground site to do demos. We update those immediately to show whats coming down the pike.

The Pantheon side of launching is only a few clicks. I moved everyone over in about 4
hours, and didnt worry about workflow.
Fast workflows save me 40 hours a week. The Pantheon side of launching is only a few clicks. I
moved everyone over in about 4 hours, and didnt worry about workflow. I dont spend any time on
deployment management. Our team of five probably spends 30-60 minutes every 2-3 weeks doing
that kind of stuff.
Anyone can push updates. Our support person isnt a developer, but she can push updates out to
clients herself. If we have minor version changes, or integration work that requires maintaining certificates, well push that into a repository and then update everybodys dev instance.
Predictable pricing. As a state entity, we would rather know what our bill is going to be month to
month. It means we can plan for that in our budget. Resource-based pricing means things fluctuate
too much. Having to run all of our client campuses under a Multisite environment was a big problem.
THE FUTURE IS COLLABORATIVE
Were just starting on another project to launch a single web application for our campus web properties. So, all of our external websites, our schedule, and our catalog will be one Drupal install. We want
to start hosting that on Pantheon. Well have a couple of different vendors who will be doing test,
code, and theme development for us. With Multidev, one vendor can be doing custom module for
bulk feeds integration in one branch, without overwriting or bumping into what the other vendor is
doing around a theme update. Were excited about using Multidev for that.

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DEVELOPERS, TRY THE ZERO-FAT

ALTERNATIVE TO MULTISITE.
If you want to write once and deploy everywhere, Multisite used to be the
only way. Now Pantheon One gives you all the benefits of Multisite, without
all the fat. Here are 5 steps to a smooth, zero-hassle launch, all year long:

1. GET YOUR FREE ACCOUNT.

Visit www.getpantheon.com to get started. Invite your developers to spin up sites
on Pantheon for free using Drupal power tools.

2. LEARN WHY MULTISITE & 100S OF WEBSITES DONT MIX.

Most Multisite implementations host many sites on a single server. Single point
of failure = deployment nightmares. One sites traffic spike brings every other
site down. Learn more at: getpantheon.com/pantheon-one/drupal-multisite

3. ADD UP THE POTENTIAL SAVINGS.

Yes, youll save on line-items like physical servers. But the greater savings
happen when your team no longer needs to spend time managing and deploying
hundreds of sites. Learn more about Pantheon One and download the
datasheet at: getpantheon.com/sites/default/files/PantheonOne-Datasheet_0.pdf

4. CALCULATE THE COSTS OF TRADITIONAL HOSTING.

See why we call Drupal self-hosting The Road to Server Hell. Then, calculate the
costs of traditional hosting when you download this white paper, Hosting is Dead.

5. GET ONE-ON-ONE ADVICE FROM DRUPAL EXPERTS.

Want advice on how to build your custom distribution? Have a hosting challenge
or technical question? Id love to chat with you about the possibility of showcasing
your story. Email me at josh@getpantheon.com.

getpantheon.com

TRUSTED BY MANY OF THE

WORLDS TOP COMPANIES.

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