DevOps on a Budget

For my latest talk at Drupal Yorkshire, I presented a rundown of some of the many hosting options for Drupal.

Despite the link baited title (not my idea 'twas Dan's) I am not a DevOps expert myself. However I have always managed my own hosting and in the past I have managed co-located servers for a start-up that I ran called ComputerMarket.com*

With an emphasis on running costs, I talked about 'Enterprise' platforms built for high-powered Drupal development through to making the most of budget shared hosting using cPanel. It is sometimes said that shared hosting is not suitable for running a busy Drupal website but my experience for low to medium traffic sites on cPanel has been quite positive.

I also discussed cloud hosting and focused on newcomer cloudways.com who are doing a great job of simplifying the task of configuring cloud infrastructure provided by companies such as Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean and Google Compute.

In particular, I wanted to share with the group some of my experience of using GitHub and DeployHQ for building out an affordable alternative to multisite hosting for the growing network of school websites which Easable manage.

DeployHQ works on the basis of using an upstream git repository to deploy code to independent sites via SFTP as part of an automated procedure. This is just what is needed for getting code and security updates installed in a timely manner to multiple installations.

It was great to have Dimitris Stoikidis from Greece and Pat Gilbert from Canada at the meetup both of whom contributed much to the discussions and big thanks to James Drawneek for the photographs.

The next Drupal Yorkshire meetup will be on Monday 9th May at the ODI in Leeds. Please visit our meetup.com page to find out more.

*ComputerMarket.com was one of the first price comparison websites in the world. The venture has long since gone by the wayside, but snapshots of the site can still be seen on the Way Back Machine at archive.org. The site even featured responsive design, although weren't catering for smartphones back then.

Whilst computermarket.com didn't win the race against Ebay (which it pre-dated in the UK) I am still quite proud of it and it wasn't many years before this way of online shopping became mainstream with the later arrival of Amazon Marketplace, Etsy and Chinese giant Alibaba.com

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