$100 Drupal Site Series: Part 2 - Resources and Infrastructure
In my previous post in this series on the $100 Drupal site I outlined a possible target market and set out why I thought very low cost sites could be a viable business model. Today I will cover the resources and infrastructure you’d need to consider to build such a service.
I am not proposing that the business is built on the premise of working for $5 per hour to build new sites for each client. The whole business should be automated. There should be no need for human interaction to close the sale and deploy the site. As soon as a worker is added to the process costs start to rise. At the same time we need some skilled professionals to build the platform and the cookie cutters.
Developers
Building a very basic Drupal site doesn’t involve that much skill, it is possible for someone to signup with a web host that uses an automated installer script, such as Fantastico, and then start building a site using stock Drupal core. Building great Drupal sites takes skills and knowledge. In order to build modular Drupal sites that can be used as part of installation profiles and deployed using automated processes, you will need someone who knows Drupal pretty well. The person driving development of the project should be passionate about Drupal as a platform. They are likely to have an opinion on the Drupal specific religious wars - Panels vs Context, CKEditor vs tinyMCE, which Slideshow / Carousel module to use etc.
Most competent PHP developers can be taught how to develop for Drupal. A second, junior, developer can be used to do a lot of the build work. They can start being a “click happy” developer and as their skills grow they can get their hands dirty writing glue modules and patches. This person should be good at driving the Drupal GUI and working with contrib.
Designer / Themer
Although customers will only be paying $100 for their site, they won’t be very impressed if they can only use Garland as their theme. They will expect a choice of themes. The themes should be designed from the ground up to be flexible Drupal themes. The designer should have experience creating designs that will be come Drupal themes. They should understand flexible regions, module themeing and how the Color module can be used to provide control to the user over their theme. Ideally the designer should be able to craft HTML and CSS, and even perform basic Drupal themeing.
System Administrator
Even though the plan is to keep costs low, it doesn’t make sense to run the $100 sites on cheap shared hosting. You need to spend money on your own solid hosting infrastructure, and if you have your own hosting infrastructure you’ll need someone to manage it. The sys admin will be responsible for keeping everything running, adding new servers, testing backups etc.
You will need a system administrator who has some experience with administering LAMP servers, previous Drupal experience is a big plus. You want someone in this role who hates downtime.
Infrastructure
One of the assumptions for this project is that 95% of the sites will have less than 50 page views per day. At first there will be very little traffic for the sites, so you can start off pretty small, but as the business grows you need to have a plan in place to handle that growth.
I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of money on buying servers outright and putting them in a data centre. Start off with some virtual machines from a cloud hosting provider, such as slicehost, linode, Rackspace Cloud or Amazon AWS. By using cloud hosting providers you can scale your infrastructure up as you need.
To get started you will probably need 3 production virtual machines, one for serving up content, one for the DB and one for search using Apache Solr. Each of the VMs should have 1G of RAM and be located in the same data centre with the same hosting company. When things start to grow you can scale up the VMs as you need and even add more servers. Each time you scale things you will also have to retune your configuration. An opcode cache such as APC or xcache will allow you to serve more requests on the same hardware. You should include some kind of monitoring service such as nagios or zabbix to make sure things are running as you want.
Once you have more than a handful of machines to manage, you will want a centralised configuration management tool. This will allow you to add new servers and have them configured as you want them with no (or very little) human intervention. I would recommend puppet for this job. Given the effort involved in retro fitting puppet in an existing environment, it will be easier to add it from the start. You may want to consider using libcloud to even handle the deployment of the VMs too.
To ensure everything can be tested properly before deployment, you should seriously consider having a replicated testing environment. Instead of having 3 more VMs, you can just run up a Linux box with 4G RAM and a relatively modern CPU and run 3 VMs on it using KVM or Xen.
What’s Next?
Now we have the business plan, the market, the team and servers in place, it is time to start looking at some of the tools we’ll be using to make all of this possible. The next post in this $100 Drupal site series will cover the tools needed to build a sustainable platform for the business.