Drupal Hosting for Higher Education
Managed Drupal Hosting for Colleges and Universities
Drupal gives a university structure: content types, workflows, and a site for every school and office. We keep that structure fast, patched, and accessible through every term of the academic calendar.
What is managed Drupal hosting for higher education?
Managed Drupal hosting for higher education is an operations service that runs a college or university Drupal platform on cloud infrastructure and takes responsibility for the application as well as the servers. It covers capacity planning around the academic calendar, multisite for schools and departments, campus single sign-on, Drupal core and module security updates, major version upgrades, security reviews such as the HECVAT, and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility. eWay Corp provides it on AWS or Azure with a 99.9% monthly uptime SLA.
- Monthly uptime SLA
99.9%
Monthly uptime SLA
- Severity-1 response, 24x7
15 min
Severity-1 response, 24x7
- Completed and ready for your security office
HECVAT
Completed and ready for your security office
- Accessibility monitored, not audited once
WCAG 2.1 AA
Accessibility monitored, not audited once
The Academic Calendar
Your busiest days are on the calendar.So we plan for them.
Generic Drupal hosting treats a traffic surge as a surprise, then throttles it or bills it as an overage. On a university website the surges are predictable, and they land on the pages that matter most to enrollment.
Application deadlines
Thousands of prospective students hit program and apply pages in the same few hours.
How we run it: Capacity is planned against your admissions calendar, with full-page caching and CDN delivery tested before the deadline, not during it.
Decision days and admitted-student events
Traffic spikes land on the pages that convert an admit into a deposit.
How we run it: Auto-scaling and pre-warmed caches on the pages that matter, with event-day monitoring and alerting.
Registration and the first week of term
Students, parents, and staff all look for the same information at once.
How we run it: Database and search tuned for peak read load, so finding a course or a policy stays fast.
Financial aid season
When the FAFSA opens and award letters go out, financial aid pages and net price calculators carry the load.
How we run it: Those pages are cached at the edge and watched through the season, so families comparing offers are not left waiting.
Commencement
Livestream pages, schedules, and parking maps get a year of traffic in an afternoon.
How we run it: Event-day monitoring and a rehearsed rollback plan for any change made that week.
Campus emergencies
Closures and safety alerts must publish instantly and stay up when everyone checks at once.
How we run it: A 15-minute severity-1 response around the clock, and a CDN purge the moment an alert publishes, so nobody sees a stale page.
What We Run
Every layer of a campus Drupal platform, under one engagement
Hosting is only the bottom layer. We operate the Drupal application on top of it too, the same managed Drupal hosting and WebOps model we run for government agencies, set up for how universities publish.
Multisite for schools and departments
One Drupal codebase serving every college, school, and office, with a shared design system and central governance. New department sites are provisioned from a template, and editors only see their own section.
Campus single sign-on and editor roles
Editors sign in with campus credentials through SAML 2.0 (including Shibboleth), Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory, or LDAP. Drupal roles and content moderation follow your directory groups.
Core and module security updates
Drupal core and contributed modules updated after testing in staging. Security advisories are tracked as they are published, and critical fixes are applied on an accelerated timeline, typically within 24 to 48 hours.
Major version upgrades
Every Drupal major version reaches end of life. We plan upgrades well ahead of those dates and test custom code against the new version, so the platform never runs on unsupported releases.
Performance and search
Page and object caching, CDN delivery, and database tuning, with a dedicated search service for large program catalogs, directories, and news archives.
Security, accessibility, and the HECVAT
A web application firewall, backups, and 24x7 monitoring, plus a completed HECVAT for your security office. Templates and new content are checked against WCAG 2.1 AA continuously, ahead of the Title II deadline of April 26, 2027.
Where it runs: your cloud account or ours
In your institution's AWS account
We operate Drupal inside the AWS account your institution already owns. The infrastructure, the data, and the bill stay with you, which often simplifies procurement and security review.
Hosted by eWay
We provide the infrastructure as part of the engagement, with one invoice for hosting and operations. Same team, same SLA, same reporting.
Accessibility remediation and ongoing conformance are also available as a dedicated accessibility compliance service. Security controls are summarized in our Trust Center.
Changing Drupal Hosts?
Moving a university Drupal platform without a bad week
Platform hosts run the infrastructure and leave the application to your team: updates, modules, upgrades, and incidents. Moving to an operator changes who does that work. The move itself follows the same six steps every time.
What a move covers
- 01Inventory the codebase, contributed and custom modules, integrations, and configuration.
- 02Build the target environment in your AWS or Azure account, or ours.
- 03Move code, database, and files, and rebuild the search index.
- 04Validate every integration, sign-on, and form in staging.
- 05Cut over DNS with a rollback path, in a quiet week on your academic calendar.
- 06Hand over runbooks, then operate under the SLA from day one.
We plan for zero unplanned downtime, and nothing in your codebase changes without a reason you have agreed to.
Our Work in Higher Education
Drupal for colleges, and operations for universities
The same operations team runs production websites for Xavier University, Morehead State University, and Central Washington University through our Cascade Website Hosting service. See everything we do for campuses on our higher education page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions about Drupal hosting for higher education
Is Drupal a good CMS for a university website?
Drupal suits universities with complex structure: many schools and departments, structured content such as programs, people, and events, granular editor permissions, and content moderation workflows. Its multisite and access-control model fits central IT plus distributed editors well. The trade-off is that Drupal needs more engineering to operate than a simple site builder, which is why most institutions pair it with a dedicated operations team or a managed operator.
Can you host our Drupal site in our institution's own AWS account?
Yes. We can operate Drupal inside your institution's own AWS account, so the infrastructure, the data, and the bill stay with you, or we can provide the hosting as part of the engagement. The operations, the SLA, and the team are the same either way.
How do you handle Drupal major version upgrades and end of life?
Every Drupal major version reaches end of life on a published schedule, and running past it means no more security releases. We track those dates for your platform, plan each upgrade well ahead of them, test custom modules and themes against the new version in staging, and schedule the cutover for a quiet week on your academic calendar.
Do you integrate Drupal with campus single sign-on?
Yes. We connect Drupal to the identity system your campus already runs: SAML 2.0 identity providers including Shibboleth, Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory, or LDAP. Drupal roles and content moderation permissions can follow your directory groups, so access changes when people change jobs.
We are on a Drupal platform host today. What does moving involve?
Six steps: an inventory of the codebase, modules, integrations, and configuration; building the target environment; moving code, database, and files and rebuilding search; validating every integration, sign-on, and form in staging; cutting over DNS with a rollback path; and handing over runbooks before we operate under the SLA. We plan for zero unplanned downtime and schedule the cutover around your calendar.
What service levels come with managed Drupal hosting for higher education?
A 99.9% monthly uptime SLA and a 15-minute response to severity-1 (site down) incidents, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, written into the engagement. We also keep a completed HECVAT ready for your security office.
Start with an assessment
Find out what your Drupal platform needs before the next deadline.
We review your Drupal environment across every layer: hosting, core and modules, security, performance, accessibility, and single sign-on. You get a plain-language report and a plan, whether or not you work with us afterwards.