By Shaun Tyndall October 24, 2014
Shaun Tyndall is founder and director of Inclind, a boutique Drupal Shop with gnarly problem-solving skills.
Inclind’s team provides professional Drupal services for regional and nationwide organizations. We serve as our clients’ technology partner, helping them navigate the ever-evolving web world. With more than 15 years in the game, we’re always ready for a new challenge. This is the story of how we’re streamlining our operations with Pantheon One for Agencies by migrating 75 Drupal and WordPress websites.
What's the Matter With Traditional Hosting?
We used to manage clients’ sites on a single-server environment or on a couple of different servers. Here’s why traditional hosting wasn’t sustainable:
1. TRAFFIC SPIKES AFFECTED EVERYONE.
Our sites were all hosted together. So a spike in traffic from one site affected all the others.
2. DOWNTIME HURT SALES.
Every Monday, 10,000 of our client Washington Green Grocer’s customers would receive an email blast announcing Green Grocer’s List for the week. Their site used to go down when everyone tried to view and order at the same time. We knew there had to be a solution that didn’t hurt clients' sales numbers.
3. DEVELOPERS LOST SLEEP, LITERALLY.
Our team used to spend 8-12 hours a week managing servers and keeping everything updated. And these weren’t regular working hours, either. These were the most inconvenient hours—like when you need to get up at 4am to put the site into maintenance mode and do an update.
4. WE JUST WERE NOT ABLE TO SCALE.
Multiply the above problems by the 75+ client websites we manage, plus new clients coming in, and we knew it wasn’t going to work for us. We had to get out of the server admin business and get back to focusing on our clients.
Why Pantheon?
Even though migrating all our clients would be a huge undertaking, it made sense for us as an agency looking to streamline our operations. Here are the top reasons why we made the shift:
1. WE HAVE FLEXIBILITY FOR BOTH WORDPRESS AND DRUPAL.
Our primary business is with Drupal, but some clients also have WordPress projects. Pantheon One for Agencies lets us manage and run all sites from one centralized location. Having that flexibility really makes sense.
2. IT STREAMLINES OUR AGENCY FOR GROWTH.
Pantheon One for Agencies gives us an overarching view of our entire portfolio. We can build, launch, and run all our clients’ sites from one dashboard. Being a partner also helps us attract clients by increasing our visibility to prospective clients throughout the region and nation.
3. IT INOCULATES AGAINST TRAFFIC SPIKES.
Architecturally, Pantheon provides an environment where each site lives in its own container. Sites don’t affect each other. This gives us a really high level of comfort on behalf of our clients.
How We're Migrating 75 Client Sites
We are in the process of migrating 75 sites over to Pantheon. Organization has been a challenge because our clients and their websites are so diverse. But our investment is already paying off. Here are a few pro tips from the process so far:
1. FIRST, MIGRATE ONE SITE FROM EACH CATEGORY.
Every site is different. Some sites use Cron or other custom modules and don’t exactly fit into the way Pantheon’s platform operates. In our initial phase, we migrated a site from each category to try to understand the complexities of the migration and the impact to the development team. Now we have strategies to easily deal with complex sites, thanks to support from the Pantheon team.
2. RUN COMPLEX SITES IN PARALLEL BEFORE MIGRATING COMPLETELY.
Complex sites require testing to ensure the functionality continues to behave as expected. We run these sites in parallel to make sure they do behave as expected before we actually complete the migration.
3. GET TO WHERE YOU CAN MIGRATE A WEBSITE IN MINUTES.
After some training to learn the ins and outs of Pantheon, we can now package up a site and migrate it to Pantheon in 15 minutes. Terminus (Pantheon’s command-line interface) has been an awesome migration tool. We’re knocking out about one website a day now.
The Results
Since we’re such a client-focused firm, any win for our clients is also a win for us. Our team loves it, too. Here are a few highlights of what’s happening so far:
1. WEBSITES SCALE WITHOUT THE NEED FOR ACCURATE TRAFFIC PREDICTIONS.
We no longer need a crystal ball to predict how much traffic a client’s website will get, and when. Most of our clients have no idea we moved their sites to Pantheon. They just know that things are working. We didn’t need to warn them about several hours of downtime. We knew they wouldn’t have any. Many people don’t care where their sites are hosted, as long as they work.
2. A FASTER WEBSITE IS A FASTER BUSINESS.
After we migrated one client, they were so happy with the new performance that they emailed us to say thanks. Administrative tasks used to take their team longer to execute. We didn’t have flexibility in the old platform to upsize them dynamically. It would have taken hours. In Pantheon’s environment, we just click a button and move them up to the next level. Within an hour, the same administrative tasks were only taking 5 seconds.
3. WE'RE HEARING, “OH! THIS MULTIDEV THING SAVES SO MUCH TIME!”.
Our guys are used to moving websites locally and having a development workflow sans the flexibility of Multidev. When you introduce it to them, it instantly clicks. They go, “Oh, that’s so easy! This is going to save so much time!”.
4. DEVELOPERS RECLAIM 8-12 HOURS A WEEK.
Pantheon saves our team so much time. Being able to spin up a new site without dealing with server administration is great for our team. As for security updates, there are certain projects we’ll be able to pull in upstream code changes without there being any downtime, because of the way Pantheon handles their upstream code changes.
5. OUR AGENCY IS STREAMLINED FOR GROWTH.
I foresee the support side of our business becoming more streamlined and profitable. We can manage more clients with the same resources. Our development process hasn’t changed much, but we get the flexibility of knowing we can upsize smoothly. We can manage multiple sites. We can spin up development environments and collaborate in the cloud with Multidev. We get all these extras we didn’t get before.
6. WE CAN NOW TAKE ON BIGGER CLIENTS.
I believe standardizing on Pantheon will help us attract bigger clients with multiple projects—like associations and higher education. Our clients will know they’re working with a trusted vendor who can facilitate consistency and reliability. They don’t have to manage another server.
To read more case studies and learn how to streamline your own agency for growth, watch the webinar Scale your Digital Agency.
Topics: Education
