Project Team

Project Team

Internal Team

  • Nonprofit’s administrative and content team

  • Volunteer developers and community contributors

External Support

  • DevPanel team for environment setup and workflow configuration

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

This project benefited from:

  • Drupal Security Team updates

  • Community-maintained modules

  • Guidance from Drupal documentation for cloud hosting

  • Volunteer contributors assisting with testing and QA

If your team contributed patches or documentation, you can mention them here.

A U.S.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization operating a large Drupal community website found that its hosting costs were increasing while development workflows remained limited. They needed a way to improve performance, strengthen security, and enable modern development practices—without exceeding their budget.

This case study explains how the organization migrated its Drupal site to AWS, implemented a new development workflow, integrated Cloudflare for performance and security, and reduced hosting costs from $3,900/year to just $95/year through nonprofit cloud credits.

About the project

Project Goals

The nonprofit needed to:

  • Modernize its aging hosting setup

  • Improve site speed and global delivery

  • Reduce infrastructure costs

  • Implement Dev/Test/Production environments

  • Simplify updates and maintenance

  • Strengthen security against bots, attacks, and DDoS

  • Support multiple developers and volunteers

Requirements

To meet these goals, the organization required:

  • A Drupal-friendly hosting environment

  • CDN integration for heavy traffic

  • WAF-level protection

  • A workflow supporting multiple development environments

  • Affordable, long-term hosting stability

  • Ability to run inside their own cloud account

Outcomes

After the migration, the organization achieved:

  • Over 90% cost reduction (from $3,900/year → $95/year)

  • Cloudflare handling ~90% of traffic, reducing server load

  • Faster page load times globally

  • Multiple on-demand dev/test environments

  • A more secure, resilient hosting infrastructure

  • Zero monthly AWS hosting costs due to nonprofit credits

Why Drupal was chosen

The organization selected Drupal for its:

  • Flexible content modeling

  • Contributor-friendly editorial workflows

  • Security track record

  • Ability to support high traffic and complex directories

  • Large ecosystem of contributed modules

  • Long-term stability for nonprofit operations

Drupal’s modularity and scalability made it an ideal platform for their community-driven website, which supports resource sharing, events, membership functionality, and multilingual audiences.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used: