Case Study
Central Washington University
Central Washington University's Cascade CMS website needed reliable high-availability hosting with disaster recovery and clean redirect management. eWay built an AWS environment with Auto Scaling, load balancing, and Pilot Light DR, and customized Apache redirection rules so legacy URLs continued to resolve cleanly through every migration and content change.
- Industry
- Higher Education
- Platform
- Cascade Website Hosting on AWS
- Services
- Managed WebOps + Cloud Operations
- Engagement
- Ongoing since 2022
Client Snapshot
About Central Washington University
- Founded
- 1891 (originally Washington State Normal School)
- Scale
- Public regional university with main campus in Ellensburg, Washington
- Website
- www.cwu.edu
Central Washington University has a long history of preparing graduates for successful careers in an ever-changing world. Beginning in 1891 as a teachers' college, CWU has continued its commitment to scholarship, public service, and student success.
The university's stated mission is to build a community of access and opportunity, fostering high-impact practices, sustainability, and authentic community partnerships grounded in meaningful relationships. Each year, students graduate from CWU as well-educated citizens ready to move the world forward.
The CWU website is a vital platform for students, faculty, and staff, and a primary recruiting and information channel for prospective students and the broader community across Washington and beyond.
The Challenge
Reliable hosting, real disaster recovery, and redirect discipline.
CWU's website is a vital platform for current students, faculty, and staff, and the primary recruiting channel for prospective students. The hosting environment needed to be stable, scalable, and capable of handling failures without dropping the site.
Without a disaster recovery setup, server failures meant the risk of downtime and data loss. Managing redirects with Apache was a separate operational headache. Without disciplined redirect configuration, every migration carried the risk of broken links, SEO ranking loss, and visitor frustration.
CWU also wanted production and staging environments operating in parallel, and proof of a third-party security assessment for the new hosting environment as soon as practical.
What was missing
No disaster recovery setup; server failures meant downtime and potential data loss
Apache redirect management at risk of broken links and SEO ranking loss
No third-party security assessment for the hosting environment
Production and staging needed to run in parallel for safe pre-release testing
Limited standby capacity for unexpected failures
The Solution
Pilot Light DR and Apache redirect discipline on AWS.
eWay analyzed CWU's requirements and built a stable, scalable AWS hosting solution with a Pilot Light disaster recovery configuration. The setup maintains a minimal standby environment that scales up rapidly during failover. Apache web server configuration was customized to match CWU's existing redirection rules, preserving legacy URLs, SEO rankings, and clean migration paths.
Production and staging environments configured for parallel operation, enabling safe testing before changes reach the live site
EC2 with Auto Scaling Groups and Application Load Balancer for traffic resilience and zero-downtime updates
Pilot Light disaster recovery: a minimal standby environment that scales up rapidly on failover, minimizing downtime and data loss
Custom Apache web server configuration matching CWU's existing redirection rules so legacy URLs continue to resolve cleanly
Automated backups and rapid recovery procedures aligned to defined RPO and RTO
Third-party security assessment of the hosting environment delivered as part of the engagement
Architecture
A glimpse of the stack
Application
Cascade Website Hosting (Cascade CMS publish target on AWS)
Cloud Infrastructure
AWS: EC2, Auto Scaling Group, Application Load Balancer
Disaster Recovery
AWS Pilot Light: minimal standby, rapid failover
Web Server
Custom Apache configuration with disciplined redirect management
The Outcome
Always-on hosting with disaster recovery and SEO-preserving redirects.
Always-on through traffic surges
Auto Scaling and the Application Load Balancer absorb traffic increases during admissions cycles, athletic events, and news-driven spikes without operator intervention.
Disaster recovery built in
The Pilot Light configuration keeps a minimal standby environment running at all times. When primary infrastructure has trouble, the standby scales up rapidly, minimizing downtime and protecting against data loss.
Legacy URLs that keep working
Custom Apache redirection rules preserve every existing URL through migrations and content reorganization. Visitors do not hit broken links. Search engines do not see ranking-killing 404s. Migrations stay smooth across staging and production.
Cost-efficient resilience
Pilot Light keeps essential services running at all times without paying for a full hot-standby environment. CWU recovers quickly from unexpected failures while keeping infrastructure cost optimized.
CWU's Cascade-on-AWS environment now combines auto-scaling resilience, Pilot Light disaster recovery, and disciplined redirect management as a single managed platform. eWay continues to operate both production and staging environments under SLA, with periodic security assessments, performance monitoring, and incident response handled by the eWay team rather than the campus IT staff.
Common questions about this engagement
What buyers ask before engaging us on a project like Central Washington University
What is Pilot Light disaster recovery and why did CWU choose it?
Pilot Light is a disaster recovery pattern that keeps a minimal version of the production environment running at all times in a separate availability zone. When primary infrastructure has trouble, the Pilot Light environment scales up rapidly to take over. It strikes a balance between cost and recovery time: lower ongoing cost than a full hot standby, much faster recovery than a cold backup. For CWU, this matched the institution's tolerance for brief interruption with the budget reality of a public university.
How are Apache redirection rules preserved across migrations?
eWay customized the Apache web server configuration to match CWU's existing redirection rules and applied that configuration consistently across both staging and production environments. As content reorganizes or URL structures change, the rules are updated in a controlled way. Legacy URLs continue to resolve to the right destinations, which keeps inbound links working and preserves search engine rankings that took years to earn.
What does the production-plus-staging configuration give you?
Two parallel environments mean every change can be tested in staging before reaching the live site. Editorial and developer changes flow through staging first, get verified, and then promote to production. This eliminates the class of incidents where a content change or template update breaks the live site for visitors. It also means CWU can experiment safely with new features without putting the visitor experience at risk.
How does this protect against broken links and SEO ranking loss?
Disciplined redirect management is the entire point. Every URL that previously existed gets a redirect rule that points to the right new destination. Visitors clicking on old links land on the right page. Search engine crawlers see proper 301 redirects rather than 404s, so accumulated ranking signals carry forward to the new URLs rather than being lost. The Apache configuration is treated as a first-class part of the platform, not an afterthought.
What does eWay actually own day-to-day?
eWay owns both the production and staging AWS environments end to end: infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, security patching, performance optimization, redirect rule maintenance, and incident response under SLA. Periodic third-party security assessments are part of the engagement. The campus IT team focuses on strategic initiatives rather than the operational maintenance of the web platform.
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