Community College of Philadelphia

The Community College of Philadelphia’s website, ccp.edu, is a vital resource for students, faculty and parents. According to Website Manager and Information Architect Jason Stein, ccp.edu is “...our communication medium; it’s our heartbeat.”

For years, the college used in-house or shared hosting for this crucial communication channel. But it was challenging to manage the site with limited resources. Worse, the limitations of local hosting often meant downtime right when the site was most needed.

The Community College of Philadelphia chose Pantheon for stable, responsive elastic hosting. Now that the college doesn’t have to worry about infrastructure (or limitations of bandwidth) affecting the distribution of information to their audience, Stein is free to use Pantheon’s development tools to make the site an even more valuable resource.  

The support network at Pantheon is outstanding. Responses are always very timely. It’s always, ‘what do you need, what can we do to help you? 

—Jason Stein, Website Manager & Information Architect, Community College of Philadelphia

Before Pantheon: Vulnerability, Downtime, and Fear of Fire

When the Community College of Philadelphia decided to redesign their public site, they knew it was an opportunity to find a more flexible, reliable hosting solution. Their in-house hosting tied the responsiveness of all the college’s sites together; if one went down, they all did.

These uptime issues were more than an annoyance; they could be downright dangerous. In an emergency situation, the website is the college’s principal way to communicate with parents and students. They would rush to the site for information and the ensuing traffic spike would take the site offline.

Relying on physical, local servers also invited risk worse than power outages or traffic spikes. At one point, a fire broke out in the same building where the servers were housed. Though the fire didn’t make it to the server room, Stein imagined losing the site in a puff of smoke—or a blast from a firehose. As Stein puts it, “Now you have water damage, or a fire department that wouldn’t let you come in to save the server. Our infrastructure is in little plastic boxes! What do we do?”

For a new host, the college demanded a solution that would keep the site running under heavy traffic load. That was a given. But they also wanted to expand the site’s possibilities, to let faculty and departments develop and manage their own microsites. For that, they needed a Drupal platform with robust development tools that would make experimentation easy.

Choosing Pantheon: A Reputation for Excellence

The college put out an RFP for a new hosting solution in early 2013. Jody Bauer, Vice President of Information Technology Services and CIO, was impressed with Pantheon’s proposal, particularly its Drupal development capabilities. When she consulted her IT colleagues, they assured her Pantheon was an excellent choice.

“[Pantheon was] the only candidate with integrated Drupal developer platform functionality that provided fully managed hosting and support for customized Drupal distributions among our faculty and staff,” Bauer says. “Having a single web architect, this was critical.”

Rather than migrate the old site, the college built the new ccp.edu from scratch on Pantheon, taking advantage of Pantheon’s workflow tools to develop and test. Once work was complete, Stein was able to smoothly push the site from the Test environment to Live.

With Pantheon: Certainty, Reliability, and New Development Opportunities

Now that ccp.edu is free from the limitations of local hosting, Stein can be confident it will be available any time the public needs it. “We’ve had issues here since we launched our site where our power goes out,” he says. “All the internal systems go down, but we KNOW the external site is up.” This certainty–come fire, flood, or traffic spike–has inspired the college to begin migrating all of the college’s internal sites to Pantheon as well.

With Pantheon’s workflow tools, Stein can allow more end users to make their own updates, while controlling the changes that get pushed to the live site. “This is the first platform that has an integrated version control system that is easy and makes sense,” Stein says. He plans to use Pantheon’s cloud-based development tools to empower departments to quickly spin up their own sites, without having to go through IT for approval.

The Future: New Resources for Faculty and Students

With Pantheon, the Community College of Philadelphia can have the same tools and capabilities that big state universities have, without breaking the budget. The college can rely on Pantheon to keep ccp.edu responsive during emergencies, heavy traffic, and in day-to-day operations. Pantheon’s development tools provide stability and standardization that allows the college to experiment and add new functionality to the site. And students, parents, and faculty can rest assured that the heartbeat of ccp.edu will stay strong and steady.

For more on how Pantheon works for higher education institutions, download our eBook, 4 Wonders of the Higher Education World. Or create a free Edu account to explore for yourself.