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Drupal (CMS): What is the best way to deploy the site?
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Drupal (CMS): What is the best way to deploy the site?
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Global Tech Evangelist. Guy from Earth. Dangerously Technical. Glass Explorer6y
Originally Answered: What is the best way to deploy the site?
Pantheon has dev, test (stage), and live (production) environments as standard. In my eight years in Drupal, I've seen their DrupalCon presentations in the USA and Europe and followed them because they understood the fastest site configurations for Drupal, as in rapid response time. I cheered their launch of Pantheon. In addition, they understand real development and production environments.
Acquia would be another quality hosting provider for Drupal with dev, test, and live environments, an incredible understanding of the real issues, and fast response times.
One management issue is updating core and modules. Both Pantheon and Acquia make this relatively easy. Same with back-up and recovery for/from any state of code.
You can easily bring up a Drupal site anywhere. If you want to play with it, go to Bitnami and bring a Drupal 6, 7, or 8 site up somewhere like AWS (Amazon Web Services). But, when you need to bring a site live, make content changes, and add code or modules-you will want a rigorous hosting provider steeped in the real issues of site developers and site managers, so go to Pantheon or Acquia.
There may be other good hosting providers, but be very cautious.
I've also used a major hosting provider that is very responsive with service. However, they don't know Drupal on the LAMP stack and they surely don't know Drupal performance or how to cache for speed or partner for security. My example of getting help from them is that I get the L guy or the A guy or the M guy or the P guy; but I can't get the LAMP stack on Drupal guy who knows performance and security.
Hope that helps.
Don't learn Dev Ops tools (PuppetLabs, Chef, etc.) unless you plan on deploying many sites or you really understand the environment that you want to build and deploy (such as Vagrant for development environments). And/or, you truly have a custom Continuous Integration (CI) and software deployment need (such as Jenkins for CI), Avoid Dev Ops and sysadmin (systems administration) unless those are areas of real expertise, software development need, competitive advantage, and value to your firm.
Horses for courses as the English saying goes, pick what you need. I also like the quality guys' expression, "conformance to requirements."
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Global Tech Evangelist. Guy from Earth. Dangerously Technical.
Works at MediaFirst (M1PR, Inc.)
Studied at Case Western Reserve University
Lives in Metro Atlanta
7K content views
Joined Quora November 2010
