Lullabot is hosting its Do It With Drupal conference in NYC from Oct. 12 to 14.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — While most people enjoyed the Grammys from their couch, Drupal developer Lullabot (www.lullabot.com) and its hosting provider Neospire (www.neospire.com) were busy making sure the Grammys’ website stayed online. The awards show happens one night out of the year, and if its website goes down, Lullabot president and co-founder Matt Westgate says, it’s the equivalent of the site being down for six months.
“The Grammys is for one night, one day out of 365 days,” Westgate says. “It’s going to get a ton of traffic.” Lullabot developed the Grammys’ Drupal-based site, while Neospire provided the infrastructure.
The Grammys is just one example of a big job for Lullabot where Neospire was a big help, but it’s obviously a very significant example.
Neospire and Lullabot have worked together for a few years, and Westgate and Neospire account executive Brian Skowron both agree the partnership is based largely on trust.
“We have become a trusted resource and a single point of contact that they can work with no matter what the project is that comes up on their end,” Skowron says.
Lullabot was founded in 2006 by Westgate and his business partner Jeff Robbins after they recognized a need for “best practices, architecture, consulting, just kind of mentorship on how to build Drupal websites.” In addition to development and consulting, Lullabot provides Drupal educational resources at drupalize.me.
“What we want to do is empower, teach best practices and set people up to be self-sufficient,” Westgate says.
Neospire handles the “infrastructure side of things,” Skowron says. He says Drupal has challenges when it comes to scalability, but that there are a lot of open source technologies that help make it scale, like reverse proxy cache Varnish (www.varnish-cache.org).
“Every case is different, but in general, what we bring to the table when we’re working on these Drupal environments is we have a lot of the performance and scalability expertise,” Skowron says.
“Beyond that, we’re also handling the hardware scalability, increasing server resources either by scaling out with load balancing or by scaling up server hardware.”
Westgate says Neospire went “above and beyond” when it came to the Grammys, and Neospire had an open bridge line the entire night.
“They had teams on standby, they had television screens on the wall that were monitoring all of the Grammys status,” Westgate says. “It’s that level of service that we were really impressed with.”
To ensure the uptime of the Grammys site, Lullabot worked with Neospire to make sure the software stack was solid, Westgate said, including putting the right caching in place and having a redundancy plan. The team wrote up a disaster recovery plan as well, and considered the worst-case scenarios.
“We took every scenario, if the site is slow because we have too many authenticated users we can do this, if the site is slow because there’s too many anonymous users we can do this,” Westgate says. “Luckily we didn’t need to do any of those things. But knowing what to do, and how to do it, was the most important aspect.”
Westgate says Drupal has preferences that hosting providers should learn if they want to win Drupal contracts. The size of the contracts is impressive, as Lullabot has worked with websites such as MTV London, Lifetime and Fast Company.
“Folks in the Drupal community are choosing hosting vendors that hire Drupal staff, that hire system administrators that are skilled with Drupal and that have a proven track record with launching and maintaining high-end Drupal sites,” Westgate says.
Westgate says Lullabot’s educational library drupalize.me site is a good place for web hosts looking to break into Drupal to start.
“For the last six years we have been shooting videos, we have been making documentaries, we’ve been writing books, but in particular, we took all of our learning experience from the Grammys and all of the other sites that we’ve done and we shot a video on how to do it.”
Lullabot is hosting its Do It With Drupal conference in NYC from Oct. 12 to 14.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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