Web Hosting Services

The Vendor is required to provide for the provision of web hosting services for its primary public-facing websites.
- Provide secure, scalable, and reliable web hosting services for the university’s primary public-facing websites, which is built on the Drupal content management system (CMS).
- The university’s marketing & communications and IT Services teams to support optimal performance, uptime, security, and maintenance of the site.
- It is a high-traffic platform that includes academic program information, news, events, and departmental microsites.
- Current CMS: Drupal (version 10, moving to version 11 by mid-2026)
- Estimated monthly traffic: ~200,000 page views
- Approximate content size: 15 GB
- Number of users/editors: ~150 (role-based permissions)
- Hosting partner will be responsible for delivering:
•    Web hosting platform
•    Backup and recovery
•    Security and compliance
•    Technical Support
•    Development tools
•    Management Tools
•    Implementation and data migration services
- Platform architecture
•    Cloud-based or dedicated hosting optimized for Drupal 10 and newer
•    Scalable resources to handle traffic surges, including monitoring tools to identify nature and source of traffic
•    Integrated global content delivery network
•    Two independent code bases included (each with their own development, staging, and production environments).
•    High performance tuned stack including NGINX, PHP, SOLR, varnish, MySQL, and a distributed file system
•    Support for handling .HRAccess or redirect rules.
- Environment workflow and development tools
•    Development (sandbox) and testing (staging) environments for new properties
•    Isolated GIT environments for dev, staging, and production environments.
•    Automated deployment tools for managing releases, allowing continuous integration with version control software
•    Platform hooks to allow for automation and connection with continuous integration and delivery services.
•    Allow drush commands and server provisioning via scripting to power automation
•    Centralized site management dashboard
•    Team management tools for developers and site administrators
- Performance and monitoring
•    Bundled subscription to new relic APM pro for every site and environment
•    Uptime monitoring and alerts for every site and environment
•    Provide code-level visibility to every website performance
•    99.95% uptime service level agreement
•    Detailed analytics and reporting dashboards
- Disaster recovery
•    Highly available instances, resilient to single component failures, recoverable in the event of data center failure, not reliant on the services of any single employee
•    Automated daily backups that are redundantly stored and portable off-platform, 30- day minimum.
•    One-click restore to a previous database backup version
•    Data residency and region availability in state
- Security and compliance
•    Resource isolation for memory, disk, CPU, and other server resources
•    Prevent direct execution, even within the containers, of files uploaded through the website
•    Layer 3 & 4 DDOS protection and mitigation
•    Bundled anti-malware protection to ensure our system's integrity and to prevent malware from spreading through the properties
•    Guard against network intrusions, detecting and preventing unauthorized host access 
•    Firewall that allows for signature-based rules filtering, DDOS protection filtering, IP filtering, and geo-fence filtering
•    Allow for rate limiting configuration to guard against abusive traffic and behavior
•    SSL certificates and supporting https
•    Ensure compliance with PIIDPA, including a preference for hosting in state data centers.
•    Regular security updates and patching of Drupal and web server components.
- Technical support
•    24x7x365 chat and phone support, as well as ticketing and escalating support
•    1-hour critical response SLA
•    4-hour high response SLA

- Contract Period/Term: 5 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: August 14, 2025