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S T
H O D
D EA
IS
A Prescriptive Guide
to Revitalizing Your Website
Table of Contents
Website owners: this means you can get out of the business of managing software
updates, configuring networking, hardware, and security. You are free to innovate and
iterate on the web on your own terms, focusing on creative designs, great copy, and killer
user experiences.
Your developers are free to work on new features and performance enhancements. Now
is the time to innovate and fine tune your online message. If you are spending even a
moment on underlying hardware or infrastructure software, you are wasting time and
money. Don’t get left behind!
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HOSTING IS DEAD
Fragile-Site-O-Phobia
Symptoms: Saying things like “The site must never, ever, change!” or “We don’t update our sites,
or they will break.”
Prognosis: When your team is afraid of breaking the site because there’s no reliable way to test
and deploy changes, your site is no longer a marketing tool; it’s a burden.
Remedy: Use a platform that allows for agile marketing, automated testing, and maximizing the
Drupal and WordPress content management functionality.
4
Content Paralysis
Symptoms: Saying things like “We can’t update the website this week because the developers
are working on new features,” or “We can’t make any changes after 3:00pm because Grumpy Joe
from IT wants the site locked down before releasing updates.”
Prognosis: When the marketing team is not able to release content updates while developers
are working on new features, your team works at a snail’s pace spending more time coordinating
website releases than making the site better.
Remedy: Use a website operations platform that allows marketers to publish content on demand
while providing developers the tools needed to push new features weekly (all while keeping
content synchronized between dev, test, and live).
Symptoms: Saying things like “Maybe the office internet is just slow, boss,” or “I’m not sure if our
site loads fast in Europe or Asia.”
Prognosis: Research shows that users have little patience for sites that take longer than one
second to load. In fact, most customers surveyed will not repurchase from a site exhibiting slow or
otherwise poor performance. If return visits are valuable, page load time matters.
Remedy: Choose a platform with built-in performance and monitoring tools, so your site runs
blazingly fast from everywhere in the world and performance issues are easy to troubleshoot.
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Ever-Present Viruses
Symptoms: Saying things like “Since I became marketing manager, I have become an expert on
bots and malware;” “Who do I call to get HTTPS certificates added to my site and how does this
stuff work?” or “It looks like the phone calls are coming—from inside my website—How is that
even possible?!”
Prognosis: The internet is rife with malicious actors and tactics: server breaches, phishing,
and bot attacks. Even if your website doesn’t contain private information, getting hacked hurts
your reputation.
Remedy: Use platform-wide security and access controls, configured and monitored by experts.
Symptoms: Saying things like “I sure hope that amazing feature about our company doesn’t take
down the site,” or “I’m a marketer, but I also know every single web error code, because I have
seen them all on my site.”
Prognosis: Blog posts going viral should be an opportunity, not a downtime disaster. Social media
should be a marketer’s friend, not a source of anxiety. When traffic comes unexpectedly, your
website needs to handle the load.
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Site Abandonment Guilt
Symptoms: Saying things like “Website? We built one a few years ago, if I recall. What about it?”
or “We just use Squarespace/Facebook as our web presence, because my website destroyed my
ability to create and keep up with my peers.”
Prognosis: Web design evolves daily, and new technologies allow companies and clients to
interact in new ways every day. Creating rich experiences depends on your team being able to
push the envelope and try new ways to make your company stand out. If you aren’t adding new
features and content constantly, it’s time to assess your tools or your process.
Remedy: Use a platform that improves the workflow, maintains guardrails, and enables both
beginner and advanced developers to work quickly and safely.
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HOSTING IS DEAD
2 Self-Hosting
When your company has a great internal sysadmin—and hardware to spare—why not, right? But
today, running websites and running an internal network are two different animals. To do it right,
your internal IT team needs to master not only your web technology, but also the configuration
necessary to support your CMS and your dev team. This includes Git, Varnish, Redis, and
deployment best practices.
3 Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is cheap and...well, it’s cheap. It’s also unreliable and underpowered for most professional
use cases. These servers also lack most modern developer tools and aren’t configured for CMS success.
It’s hard to make a case for shared hosting for a site of any value.
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4 Managed Cloud Hosting (WPEngine, Siteground, Acquia)
Managed cloud provides redundancy and often includes some workflow tools for deployment, but
you still scale by adding machines to a cluster, and frequently the configuration for development is not
precisely the same as live. Because many of these services require building bespoke clusters for every
client, they are cost-intensive and the full architecture can’t affordably be mirrored in development and
test environments.
A qualified sysadmin with Drupal and WordPress expertise is one of the most difficult roles to find and fill in the
tech industry. Moreover, the cost is prohibitive, even for many large companies. Support quality and speed are
just as important to consider with managed hosting options. Be sure to vet the human side to your provider, not
just CPUs and RAM.
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HOSTING IS DEAD
Who will handle server configuration and updates: setting up the OS, web server, and caching?
Why it matters: Visitors give up when pages load slowly or your site goes down resulting in lost leads, sales, etc.
Hosting environments need to be set up properly and caching systems configured to withstand traffic spikes.
“We’ve got to innovate Maintaining a custom AWS stack was costly and the time required
like crazy. We need to manage it often kept the Patch dev team from from innovating
to be able run stuff at breakneck speed. Now they publish 800-1,000 stories a day with
up, have ideas crash
help from Pantheon’s digital experience platform.
and burn, and have
infrastructure that can
support us.”
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HOSTING IS DEAD
YOU You and your team do all of the setup, maintenance, monitoring, and security
configurations for the entire stack; leaving less time to make your website great.
By freeing you from hosting considerations, Pantheon helps you focus on finding new and innovative ways
to get your message out. We have shown thousands of marketing teams that, when unhindered by hardware
and infrastructure limitations, they are able to push the limits of what they can do. With a powerful CMS and
Pantheon, content and design become your focus. And your marketing campaigns can become exponentially
more inventive and creative.
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HOSTING IS DEAD
Managed
Features Self-Hosting EC-2 Pantheon
Hosting
Manual/ Manual/
Add New WP/Drupal Sites Manual One Button
Automated Automated
Included with
Managing Dev/Test/Live Manual Manual Manual
Every Site
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HOSTING IS DEAD
With Pantheon:
Enjoy the fastest platform in the world, benefitting end-user experience as well as SEO rankings.
Get onto the platform and up-to-speed with zero interruption with our elite onboarding, migration
services, and a dedicated customer success manager.
UNITED
NATIONS
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