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This is Facet's Drupal implementation best practices checklist and survey for onboarding new clients. It is not an exhaustive list, and it is fairly opinionated—but it's the best thing we have for mitigating risk and ensuring reduced total cost of maintenance when onboarding new clients.

Hosting Infrastructure

We assess the hosting infrastructure for each new client as they are onboarded in order to ensure they have an appropriately sized, supportable, performant, and scalable infrastructure.

From time-to-time, we may need to update the infrastructure hosting requirements for our clients depending on changing traffic, static file storage, or authenticated user traffic. Other variables may also apply.

Come back to this checklist as needed to demonstrate evolving needs to our clients.

• [ ] Drupal-tuned hosting Provider?

  • When onboarding new clients who are already using Drupal, we ensure that our development workflow is streamlined and the total cost of ownership is reduced for ongoing updates, maintenance, and deployments.
  • We also don't present ourselves as infrastructure experts to our clients, and we depend on the expertise of these tuned-Drupal hosting providers to ensure ongoing infrastructure updates, performance optimizations, and other under-the-hood implementations are in place.
  • [ ] Pantheon
  • [ ] Platform.sh
  • [ ] Acquia
  • [ ] Amazee
  • [ ] Other?

• [ ] File Storage

  Document the following information about the client's site in order to identify potential risks around supporting the site. We want to be aware of exceptional amounts of files to ensure the file storage infrastructure will continue to scale with the site's growth.

  • [ ] Size
  • [ ] Number of Files
  • [ ] File Types
  • [ ] File Tree/Structure
  • [ ] On-Server vs. 3rd Party Object Storage (s3)

• [ ] CDN

  • Does the site use a CDN?
  • Is the CDN provided by the hosting provider?
  • Would a different/additional CDN provide additional performance?
  • What configuration is the CDN in? Origin Pull? Push?

• [ ] Database

  • What database and version?
  • Is the database using an appropriate collation for the data?
  • Where is the database stored?

• [ ] Caching

  • What caching information is already in place?
  • Is the authenticated user experience cached?

• [ ] Search (Solr)

  • Is Solr currently set up on the site?
  • How is Solr configured?
  • Is Solr included in the platform service provider, self-hosted, or is it external PaaS?

• [ ] Offsite Backups

  • What is the current offsite backup configuration?
  • Who has access to offsite backups?
  • In a step-by-step outline, how would the backups be restored?

• [ ] HTTPS Secure Site

  • [ ] HSTS (Available on Pantheon)

• [ ] Disaster Recovery / Continuity Plan

  • Does the site have a current disaster recovery plan?
  • Has the disaster recovery ever been tested?
  • What is the maximum allowable downtime for the site?

Telemetry

• [ ] Production Performance Monitoring
  • [ ] NewRelic
  • [ ] DataDog
• [ ] Uptime Monitor

Security