Over the past year LSA Technology Services has embarked on the task of identifying a web hosting company to manage the College’s diverse ecosystem of WordPress sites.
In July 2022, the committee selected and acquired Pantheon to serve as the hosting environment for all of LSA WordPress multisite installations. Pantheon is known for their high-performance, scalable, cloud-based WordPress hosting service specializing in supporting higher education institutions. This unique expertise allows them to fully understand our web hosting requirements and needs. Pantheon offers a super fast content delivery network, automated backups, and secure infrastructure. In addition, it has built-in WebOpps and workflows that allow for modern, collaborative experimentation in siloed development environments.
As site migrations begin in early October, they should not cause any downtime on the WordPress platforms and will not impact the website editing experience for site administrators. There will be a 2-4 day content editing freeze for users that will be communicated via email ahead of time.
What to Expect
Phase 1
Phase I will focus on our multisite WordPress network services:
- courses.lsa.umich.edu
- Sites.lsa.umich.edu
- Digitalscholarship.umich.edu
Digitalscholarship.umich.edu launched in Oct. 2022. Courses.lsa.umich.edu launched during Spring Break 2023. Sites will follow after this in April 2023. Throughout the process, communications will be sent to the various user groups and administrators. These communications will also include a content freeze notification, one day before migration begins on sites.
Phase II
Phase II will focus on migrating our cPanel sites that are independent and self-hosted websites. These sites will be moved into the network one at a time. This will be an interactive process with a target timeline for the end of the Fall semester.
We are looking forward to our working partnership with Pantheon and making the most of the platform’s modern dev-opps tools, cloud-based hosting, and security benefits.
For any questions or concerns please reach out to the LSA Technology Services Web and Application Development team at LSATechnologyServices@umich.edu.
