Why Do it Yourself? – The Hidden Cost of DIY Drupal Hosting

Drupal offers well-defined best practices for configuring your hosting environment to guarantee it is performant, scalable, and secure. While it is feasible to apply such principles yourself on a generic hosting provider, selecting a strategic partner that is a domain specialist in Drupal hosting may save you substantial time, money, and resources.

Drupal users recognize its strength and versatility. Drupal is an open source technology, which means the software is free. In addition to being free, Drupal is backed by one of the world's largest and most inventive open source communities.

This community is always contributing new features and integrations depending on the needs of their own business as well as the ever-changing expectations of consumers worldwide. These contributions are subsequently made available to all Drupal users, which is why, when it comes to embracing new technology, Drupal users are typically ahead of proprietary platform users.

Drupal's adaptability, versatility, and large contributor community make it easy to be innovative while meeting your consumers' expectations. However, creating and maintaining the infrastructure required to ensure that your Drupal application is always online and that your developers have all of the tools they need to construct digital experiences can rapidly become difficult and costly. Worse, the flexibility Drupal promised has been reduced since your team must now spend time managing, upgrading, and protecting your infrastructure - time that might be spent inventing.

Drupal is free, and hosting appears to be inexpensive, but you must still create and manage all of the infrastructures that support your Drupal work. This may be pretty intimidating.

Setting up Scalable and Secure Infrastructure

To run any Drupal application, you must first construct a hosting infrastructure. You should decide whether to host on-premises or in a cloud, and then set up storage, databases, and file systems, etc., and put in place network services, caches, data centers, and your content delivery network (CDN).

Following that, you must deploy monitoring and management systems to ensure availability. Monitoring for availability, however, is insufficient; you must also integrate resilience into your platform and guarantee that all components of the infrastructure automatically grow to handle the demand. So, even if your Drupal application is suddenly flooded with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of consumers, your infrastructure is prepared.

But you aren't done yet. It's not always traffic that brings your site down; sometimes it's the infrastructure itself that breaks. You must guarantee that your whole infrastructure is highly available and that you have a fail-safe business continuity strategy in place in the event that your core infrastructure fails.

Your Hosting Platform Requirements

You may always select a platform provider to avoid the problems that come with self-hosting your Drupal application. While this may appear to be a straightforward task, customers have high expectations for both content availability and data security. One security blunder and your brand's reputation is jeopardized. If you have an issue with content delivery speed, your consumer will go elsewhere. 

Your hosting platform must be secure, compliant with industry-specific regulations, highly available, and scalable, which means the shared hosting provider you choose must meet all of these requirements.

Trouble-Free Security and Compliance

Updating and maintaining site security is a never-ending task. How many components of your IT infrastructure must be monitored for security threats? How much danger do you subject yourself to if the personnel in your business in charge of IT security are not primarily focused on your Drupal cloud? Do you have the resources and employees to ensure that your Drupal environment is always secure?

It is critical that you protect every tier of the stack. Security is required at both the application and performance levels. You must also be able to deliver on compliance standards and fulfill those criteria, or you risk incurring large fines.

Your hosting platform must include the following features:

• Independent third parties conduct a range of industry-specific compliance assessments and certifications.
• Strong access and authentication restrictions, as well as a variety of firewall protections, that are all built-in.
• Semi-annual third-party penetration testing.
• Continuously performed in-depth monitoring of system security.
• Assessments of continuous monitoring operations conducted on a quarterly basis.
• Vulnerability scanning of servers and online applications is performed on a monthly basis.
• Monthly scans of the operating system.
• Database scans once a month.

It is generally not cost practical to construct your own hosting infrastructure if you have 1 or 2 staff members who need to spend 3-4 weeks building the infrastructure and then maintaining it over time. Building a hosting infrastructure consumes time that might be spent on your services or goods.

If you're simply setting up an environment once and working on one site, standardizing and automating your workflow isn't necessary. However, if you're often configuring new setups and working on many sites at the same time, it makes sense to automate. Especially if you need to address a security upgrade across dozens of sites right now.

The developers that participated in the Drop solid experience cloud survey discovered the following:

• 44% used a platform provider of some type.
• 27% of respondents were employing an in-house created and managed solution.
• 28% had nothing and had to do everything by hand.

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Getting your Control and Freedom

Many Drupal hosting clients have previously suffered from having little control and flexibility over shared hosting and infrastructure (regardless of whether their provider was internal or external). You have to file work requests or tickets for each task you intended to accomplish, which caused delays and irritation.

Acquia began to consider how to shorten project execution timeframes by making microtasks easier to execute and reducing bottlenecks. Anyone who has established this kind of automated system understands the benefits of investing in them. However, not everyone has the capacity or the time to begin constructing it themselves.

Uncover hidden costs in your dev-to-deploy process

To begin, examine how long it'll take your developers to execute a job and then multiply that by the frequency with which they must complete those tasks. You would then compare it to the time it would take to construct and maintain an automated system, or the expense of purchasing a solution.

When calculating hidden costs, you should also consider how long consultants and workers are sitting idle while waiting for someone else to perform a task. Your teams may be accustomed to raising tickets for manual chores on conventional hosting. Perhaps they have accepted large wait times and accounted for them in the most effective way possible in project planning.

Empowering teams to do more

Businesses want web development teams to be able to achieve more while waiting less.



Acquia is committed to ensuring that nothing stands in the way of the development of Drupal applications. Acquia's built-in development tools, processes, and fully managed platform remove delays and uncertainty. Acquia provides your firm with a comprehensive collection of solutions for providing improved digital experiences. Acquia provides all of the tools required to develop Drupal applications, such as the most user-friendly, low-code solutions on the market, a built-in CDN, application performance management (APM), and more.

Acquia enables stakeholders within your business to create attractive, powerful, scalable, on-brand website builder in less than half the time required with standard CMS platforms. You have the most user-friendly toolkit on the market for developing and swiftly spinning up brand-compliant sites at scale with Site Factory and Site Studio.

Finally, because your staff is focused on maintenance and reacting to urgent troubleshooting, they are wasting time that might be spent creating Drupal apps. As a result, your firm forfeits critical progress toward strategic corporate priorities. The expense and danger you incur will be enormous unless you have the right tools to perform cloud administration, including everything required for monitoring and control of your infrastructure.

Based on proven outcomes with joint clients, Acquia is an enterprise-grade digital experience platform for delivering Drupal digital experiences, and we would recommend their Drupal cloud. Acquia increases the value of AWS by allowing its clients to innovate and go to market faster while avoiding overpaying.

Acquia's Drupal Cloud has everything you love about DIY Drupal hosting and nothing you don't. Most businesses save up to 40%, complete projects faster, and perform better work - let's discover how much you can save. For more details connect with us now!