Drupal Managed Hosting

We offer managed hosting for the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) [1]. Managed Hosting, while not for everyone, is for those that don't want to deal with the day to day maintenance and routine upgrade needs of administrating their own Content Management System, but are quite capable of creating the content for their website and want to only follow a few simple steps to add the content. It is for those that understand time is money, and your time is better spent working on your business than researching esoteric, single use functions and procedures in the depths of a business tool.

As you are looking for managed hosting services, we don't expect you to know the Drupal name, module, or method for the functions you want. Part of the value we add is that you only need to give us your desired functionality list and we'll do all the mumbo-jumbo translation so that your site has the features you want.

Or rates are:

  • 250 Euro per year for Managed Hosting
  • 40 Euro per task hour for Customization work
  • 40 Euro per calendar hour for Content work

Hosting includes:

  • Installation of the Drupal core and our standard module cluster.
  • All Drupal specific maintenance and upgrades.
  • Installation of one custom themes.
  • Customized, themed, footer message.
  • Tracking of all modifications and hacks.
  • Domain "catch all" email address plus 5 specific Email addresses.
  • A friendly one way text link from our home page to your domain.
  • FTP account to your Theme directory. (Theme warning)
  • Immediate Google indexing of site upon turn over.

You will be given a Temporary Sub-domain to build with. That way you may maintain your existing website during construction and when you switch nameservers you will have minimal visitor interruptions.

Our Standard Drupal Module Cluster:

The Drupal core plus a subset of these modules handles the needs of roughly 90% of all content management sites. The features they represent are too numerous to list, but include: multiple users and roles, simple and advanced page creation, comment management, ad provider integration, form spam blocking, "email this page", page summaries, modifiable menu, auto RSS feeds, multiple mechanisms to display page data, customizable data and form building, image uploading, statistics/logs, post categorization, SEO friendly URLs, etc.

This is a partial list of the modules we've researched, tested, and currently have in use on multiple domains we manage.

  • adsense (Regular or Custom Channel)
  • auto_nodetitle
  • captcha (block form submissions from spambots)
  • cck, and addons (custom content building)
  • civicrm (constituent relationship management, advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups)
  • excerpt (user entered excerpt/summary/teasers)
  • forward ("forward this page" / "email this page" )
  • pathauto (SEO friendly addressing)
  • quotes (Quote of the Day, etc.)
  • referral
  • service_links (submit links for Reddit, Digg)
  • token
  • views (primary customization of data display)

All Drupal modules we install are researched and tested in a non-production environment. No one can claim they will never have a site outage, or write a bad piece of code, which is why we always test modules even if they are from trusted third-parties.

Customization:

Code Customization:

We can customize any part of Drupal you wish, up to and including hacking core to achieve the functionality you desire. If a module doesn't work the way you want, we'll modify it to fit your requirements. For an example of both theme and module customization, you can view our client from Reason to Freedom for the use of a custom channel AdSense module, which allows each Author on their site to have a dedicated AdSense channel. In many cases the generic AdSense modules' revenue sharing based upon sitewide hit rates works fine, if you don't need a high level of granularity.

Do note, that while we have hacked core successfully, we are against the policy in general. An example of a minor core hack may be found on our client ClearSpend who desired to have menus visible when visitors received "Page Not Found" messages.

All code customization is charged by the Task Hour. You will not be charged for research or testing, but by one Euro per line of code for programming tasks and standardized implementation time for functions. This way you are insulated from having your work performed by a junior member who takes three times as long, thereby inflating the billable amount. For example our client ClearSpend was charged 18 Euro to test and implement the code to accomplish their bottom of font page category listing that data pulls the description and synonym list into the link title fields.

Content Migration/Customization:

Manual content migration, menu building, re-location of images, etc. is easily achieved and in most cases, if your existing site is under 20-50 pages and you just want to migrate everything you currently have, it is cheaper to have us do a manual migration for you. If you need a fast switchover, as you are about to run out of a hosting plan somewhere else, then having us do it is the way to go, as in most cases we can have a less than 100 page site manually migrated in under 24 calendar hours.

All content related work is charged by the Calendar Hour. Migration of a simple 5 page website might take 15 minutes. Or a site with 5 pages of many precisely placed graphics, changing menus, or heavily specialized functionality might take 3 days. The simpler, the faster, the cheaper...

Theming Customization:

While there are many 'free' Drupal themes available for use, most users of Drupal eventually end up making some modification to their theme structure. Which makes sense as the look and feel of a website is a make or break issue with most visitors. This is also why we give you direct FTP access to your custom theme directory. You may thereby theme to your heart's content, or if you have the desire, but lack the skill, we have people available who can make modifications to an existing theme or build you one from scratch.

[Theme warning] As a word of warning, if your theme breaks your site, you will be charged by the calendar hour for us to repair it. Emergency repair rates are billed on the calendar hour and are 1.5 times standard rates M-F 9am - 7pm US CST and 2 times standard rates for all other times.

Example Client Customization Work:

250   Setup Drupal CMS core with relevant modules
-   1st Custom theme installation and testing
40   2nd Custom theme installation and testing, approx. 1 hour per (if no bugs)
80   Text migration and menu setup for 20 page existing site, approx. 2 hours
30   10 Image placements on 5 pages, approx. 5 minutes per page plus 2 minutes per image
==== 
400   Euro

Additional Offerings:

Bulk importation of content into your domain's Drupal database:

If you find yourself with the need to transfer more than a thousand pages of content from your old system to your new system, we will write a custom MySQL script to upload your existing data into the Drupal table structure. The cost is $1 per resultant node (web page) with a 1,000 node minimum. We have successfully created and executed MySQL scripts that have imported into Drupal 10,000+ web pages for a single domain. It requires a significant amount of analysis of your existing content, significant programming and text parsing to create the MySQL scripts, and a fair amount of time babysitting the MySQL scripts while they run. It can be done, but it's not easy, so it's not cheap.

Text Link Sales and Management:

For Clients:

We offer both text link sales and general text link management services for our clients. After your website gets Page Rank 1+, we have available one way friendly links from PR 2, PR 3, and PR 4 pages at respectively 36, 72, and 180 Euro per year. After your website gets page(s) with PR 3+, we can manage a reciprocal link program or sell links for you on a space available basis.

Reciprocal Text Link Management:

The management fee is per link per month at PR 3 - $1.50, PR 4 - $3, PR 5 - $5, PR 6 - $12+. The higher the page rank the less the chance of link partner availability, with the probability of reciprocal links not being available more than one ranking higher that the PR of your page. We can manage each PR 3+ page on your site to a maximum of 11 reciprocal links per page.

  • Probable best case for a single PR 3 page on the your website site is six PR 3 reciprocal links and five PR 4 reciprocal links (24/month).
  • Expected results for two PR 3 pages on your website (22 max recip. links) is to get roughly ten PR 3 and five PR 4 links (30/month).
  • Expected result for a single PR 4 page on your website is roughly eight PR 4 and one PR 5 links (29/month).

Initial deposit is 250 Euro and the link management of at least two PR 3+ pages on your site. Your deposit is non-refundable and will be consumed by monthly link management fees computed by number and PR of inbound links at the end of each month.

Text Link Sales for Clients:

For a 50% management fee we will sell your link inventory at the prices you set. You may make available as many pages as you like at 11 links per page. Many clients sell links to fund link management activities.

Text Link Sales to the General Public:

We have available one way friendly links from PR 2, PR 3, and PR 4 pages at respectively 40, 75, and 200 Euro per year. We have clients that will 50% discount bulk purchases across single category structures, please contact us with your needs.

Text Link Disclaimers:

By purchasing text links or using link management services you agree to follow normal White Hat SEO practices. If your site is found in violation of search engine rules (Grey/Black Hat SEO practices), you will forfeit any fees paid and we will immediately remove all links to your site(s).

No page in use for any link service offered above may have a total link count greater than 75 and may not have more than 11 total links either sold or exchanged.

Use of our Google AdSense channel:

If you do not have your own AdSense account, you may use one of our custom channels for a 25% maintenance fee. You may apply your 75% to hosting/customization fees as desired.



[1] We use Drupal for our clients, as after years of research and use, we've found it to be the single most capable, flexible, supportable, and modifiable of the plethora of existing Content Management Systems. One of the other reasons we like Drupal, is that once the framework and site structure are built, it takes on average 3-5 minutes to add a new page. [return to top]