By ldavid on

Hello Drupal Community,

Our school is in in higher education and planning to migrate our website(s) onto Drupal. Any community members here who are also in higher education care to share which hosting company they've chosen and how that host is working out for the campus?

Of the ~6 hosting providers offered on the Managed Hosting list (https://www.drupal.org/hosting/enterprise) we've narrowed it down to 3: Pantheon, Acquia, and BlackMesh. Our campus isn't currently on Drupal and is fairly new to this. Between new buzz-words of multi-sites, codebases, and Site-Factories, it can get quite daunting. We have an idea of who we'd like to go with but wanted to know how other campuses are satisfied with their decisions and possibly provide any insight as to what to expect down the road.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Don

Comments

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

I'm not in education (though I was in a previous career), but I'm a Drupal guy and have used all sorts of hosting. Of the three you've mentioned, I've used Pantheon and Acquia.

I found Acquia's customer service to be sub-par. It was hard to get a hold of them, I was mis-quoted on fees, and the contact was slow. If/when you can use their service however, it's pretty good.

Pantheon was a better service overall in my opinion. Their admin interface is more intuitive, and their customer service is pretty good, though for a company of their size, they have down-times in customer service, which seems pretty ridiculous to me for a company worth millions and millions. That said, I'm not stateside, and the downtimes in customer service I faced were primarily in the middle of the nite stateside, so if you are in the states, you shouldn't face the same issue as myself for the most part.

ldavid’s picture

ldavid commented

Thank you, Jaypan, for your response. Yes we are located in the states so hopefully all we'll have to worry about is the 3hr time difference. I just finished a tech demo with Acquia and they've reassured us that they'll provide as much support with site factories (multisites) if it ever fails. I know there are some who won't touch multisites but there are also a lot who do use it and find that happy medium where it's useful but not too unstable. I'm just unsure if using multisites is the only route we have to take or not. From my understanding, if we don't use it, it's still possible but it would be a lot of micromanaging on our end. That will be for us to consider. Thank you very much for your insight.