Managed Hosting and WebOps for Cascade Published Websites

Cascade CMS is hosted and managed by Hannon Hill as a SaaS product. But when you publish content, Cascade sends that output to a separate production web server that your institution controls. Managed hosting for Cascade means managing that production environment — the web server, CDN, security configuration, performance optimization, and everything else between Hannon Hill and your website visitors. eWay manages this infrastructure specifically for how Cascade deploys, which is different from how we would host a WordPress or Drupal site.

Hannon Hill operates the Cascade CMS application as SaaS. That includes the authoring environment, the publishing engine, content modeling tools, and the SaaS infrastructure on which the CMS itself runs. eWay Corp operates everything downstream of Cascade: the production web server that receives Cascade's published output, the CDN that delivers it to visitors, security configuration, performance optimization, monitoring, and the operational discipline that keeps the site running reliably 24 hours a day. The boundary is clean. Hannon Hill ends at the publish destination; eWay begins there.

WordPress and Drupal are open-source applications that run on the production web server. Cascade is a SaaS application that publishes static output to the production web server. The hosting work is structurally different. For WordPress and Drupal, we manage the application itself: PHP runtime, database, plugin and module updates, CMS-specific security advisories. For Cascade, the application is Hannon Hill's responsibility, and we focus exclusively on the production environment that receives the published output. The infrastructure architecture, performance work, and operational discipline diverge accordingly. A team that hosts WordPress and Drupal well does not automatically host Cascade well.

Yes — and slow Cascade websites almost always have the same root causes: an under-configured production server, a poorly optimized CDN setup, or publish jobs that are creating server load that impacts front-end delivery. We begin with an infrastructure assessment to identify exactly what is causing the slowness, then address it through a combination of server configuration, CDN tuning, and caching strategy improvements. Most clients see measurable improvement within the first month of engagement.

A Publish All from Cascade pushes thousands of files to the production server in rapid succession. On generic hosting, this looks like a sudden burst of file system activity that can exhaust inodes, fill SFTP queues, or trigger anti-abuse rate limits. We architect the production environment specifically for this pattern: dedicated network paths between Cascade and the production server, pre-warmed file system capacity, automated CDN cache invalidation that runs as the publish completes, and monitoring that alerts on partial publish completion. Most institutions see large publish jobs complete reliably during enrollment cycles without manual intervention or emergency support calls.

Yes. We configure and manage Single Sign-On (SSO) using SAML 2.0, LDAP, and Active Directory integrations so your staff authenticate into Cascade through your existing campus credentials. We also support API and webhook connections between your Cascade production environment and other campus systems where the integration lives at the infrastructure layer.

Migrating a Cascade CMS hosting environment is straightforward when planned correctly. We handle the full migration — provisioning the new environment, configuring CDN and caching, migrating content and server configurations, and validating publish behavior before cutover. We plan for zero unplanned downtime, and we include a free migration for qualifying engagements. Most migrations are completed within two to four weeks depending on environment complexity.

We host on both AWS and Azure — and we design your environment around your institution's existing agreements, compliance requirements, and preferences. If your institution has an existing AWS or Azure enterprise agreement, we can provision within that framework. If you have no preference, we will recommend the architecture that best fits your Cascade deployment's specific requirements.