I'm investigating Drupal (and other) for a new CMS for our online community.

Reading the many posts and reviews on the Net, it seems Drupal is harder to install and get running that some other options.

Now SpikeSource (www.spikesource.com) is offering a CMS service (for $5K/year, I think) to provide a pre-tested CMS stack, that includes LAMP and Drupal. They say they'll take care of the installation and support headaches, which sounds good to me given that we don't have a full-time php techie available to tweak things.

Does anyone have any experience with SpikeSource, good or bad, that they can share?

Thanks,
Bob

Comments

VM’s picture

5K? 5 thousand ?
Drupal isnt that hard to install that it warrants 5 grand a year.

sepeck’s picture

If you are Drupal.org's target; developer, site admin, power user, web developer... then no, Drupal isn't that hard to install. Then you have to design your site and configure it. Of course, then you have to consider on going support, backups, offsite backups. Server OS, web server, php support and patching. Phone support. Payroll for people to answer pagers when problems occur.

It really depends on what services they offer and what skillset you have. If you are a business, then you want sevice and reliability. Increased bandwidth when your traffic goes up, updating the code base when a security announcement goes out. Answering the phone when the customer calls.

So, it's not installing Drupal that's the interesting thing, it's the getting your site designed, functioning and supported that you pay for. You would be paying for peace of mind and availability of experts. Of course, that's a theoretical discussion. I know that some spike source people float around the issue queue on occasion having seen passing mention but they're pretty quiet and I don't know anything about their specific service.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

calebgilbert’s picture

for around $200 a year for our heavily customized Drupal install. Even less if you plan to self support your site. And of course we offer customization services as well.

Current* online demo here. (*"current" meaning that there is a new one being developed which is quite a bit different/evolved)

No offense to Spikesource of course...

=====

Bloggyland.com

budda’s picture

We've met with SpikeSource regarding a partnership here in Europe.

Does the $5k actually include the hosting and server equipment, or just the software and updating subscription?

Problems we found specific to their Drupal offering:
* they are about 8 months behind Drupal Core releases. i think 4.7 is only just becoming available now.
* only a small subset of about 5-10 contrib modules are certified and available through SpikeSource.

If you want somebody else to manage the PHP end of things, such as installation and fixing of modules and themes then I'm not sure if Spike Source offer that directly. You're probably better off going with a dedicated Drupal company to look after it for you.

We offer such a managed hosting server in the UK. There's probably similar in the USA too.

--
Ixis (UK) providing Drupal consultancy and Drupal theme design.

Bob_Thompson’s picture

According to a SpikeSource rep, Drupal is a fairly new option (declined to say how many customers), and 4.7 is nearly ready. Rep didn't know details of exactly which modules were included.

For $5K per year you basically get a pre-tested stack of software, plus maintenance and tech support. The rep said it was like RedHat supporting Linux. But there's a 2 server minimum (they assume you'll have a development server) so that's $10K per year minimum for one customer.

No hosting is included. Just the software and support. And you don't buy this from SpikeSource, only their authorized reseller can do that.

I'm curious how much maintenance and support will be required over a year for Drupal. Our configuration will be to support an online community. Don't know all the modules yet, but we're trying to keep it simple. The basic question is whether we'd end up spending more than $10K per year hiring someone to do the install, maintenance and support?

corey_williams’s picture

SpikeSource provides tested, certified, installable, integrated, maintainable, supported Drupal to mid-market enterprises through a network of 50+ (and growing) web content managment solution providers.

We pull together Drupal and the rest of the stack, integrate the components so that they work right out of the box without interferring with other services on the machine, and fully test the stack (300,000+ component level tests and 3500+ custom (donated by SpikeSource) interroperability tests that exercise Drupal top to bottom.) We provide a graphical installer that allows a multi-machine install that will work without additional configuration. And we back this up with bottomless 24x7 support.

But the best part is that we continuously and automatically monitor the primary and dependant components (60+ components such as Drupal, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postgres, and all of their dependant components.) We harvest and filter all posts to newgroups, RSS feeds, posts to bug databases, new code repository additions, etc. We identify security, stability and performance issues and then acquire the appropriate fixes into periodic rollups and/or emergency updates. These updates are then subjected to the same rigorous and automated testing as the original build, ensuring the best possible source of updates for the whole Drupal Solution.

Of course if you had the same expertise that SpikeSource and its network of Solution Providers, you may choose to do all of this work and maintenance yourself (easily a fulltime+ job). However many/most enterprises don't want to be in the Drupal business - they want to be in the content business.

Oh yeah, we share the value with our solution providers and provide them a trusted brand name, co-marketing help to drive the awareness of Drupal and back them up with world class training and support.

I like to think of it as a bargain. But I also understand not everyone needs our service. For those who do, they love us.

BTW - I will try not to spam the boards with too much marketing dribble, I just thought some may be curious about what we are up to.

And check out the post on mr. buytaert's site: http://buytaert.net/spikesource-selling-drupal

Best regards,

Corey Williams
Dir of Product Management
SpikeSource
http://www.spikesource.com/solutions.html

Bob_Thompson’s picture

Corey, thanks for your post.

I must confess I'm confused about what is entailed in supporting Drupal. The Drupal community seems to say it's "no big deal" after the initial install.

You point out that it could be a full-time job to keep everything up to date, which is precisely what I can't afford. But your "solution" is just the software, and $10K/year seems like a lot when even more money will be spent on customization and ongoing usage support. So now we're talking about a good chunk of a full-time person.

What is the target audience for SpikeSource's CMS offering? "Mid-market enterprises" means what?

The support side of software is what is driving many customers to on-demand solutions. Personally, I would prefer to have one company that would provide a fully hosted and supported Drupal implementation, rather than piecing things together. SpikeSource's software stack approach only solves part of the problem of getting the application ready to do real work.

budda’s picture

Once you have Drupal installed all you need to do is subscribe to the security mailing list and act on any announcements you get which correspond to the modules you have installed. If you're keeping it simple your job should not be too time consuming.

Drupal hasn't had any problems with our mix of Apache 2, PHP 4 & 5 + mysql 3/4/5 installations (on Linux and OS X) so far. So I doubt you'll have any real killer issues. Once your platform is configured I doubt things can really go *that* wrong with Drupal.

--
Ixis (UK) providing Drupal consultancy and Drupal theme design.