Hosting and maintaining legacy Drupal sites

The Public Health Agency had a suite of Drupal sites ranging from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. We migrated the Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 8 and provide ongoing support and maintenance for the entire range of sites.

Client:
Public Health Agency Northern Ireland
Duration:
May 2019 to present

The challenge

The Public Health Agency had built a range of Drupal sites over a number of years using in-house expertise. The sites were based on various versions of Drupal and built in a variety of different ways.

When PHA were no longer able to rely on their in-house expertise alone we were contracted to provide long-term hosting and support.

What we did

We started out by standardising the hosting on Platform.sh and adding each site to our automated hosting and support plan. This provided a stable foundation on which to move ahead with security and functional updates.

The results

Uptime

The sites have an overall uptime of over 99.99% uptime since the move  and all sites are patched and updated within hours of a security release becoming available.

Performance under pressure

The clearest endorsement of the move has been the continued performance of the Public Health Agency site despite a 1300% increase in visitors and a 1500% increase in sessions as a result of the COVID-19 emergency.