[cross posted from Bryght.com] 

Bryght is moving to a more reliable platform to accommodate growing demand for the Bryght hosted service. Our new system can grow continuously, and will provide a better experience for our valued Bryght customers.

The Bryght team has been working hard over the past little while in preparation for this move. We have "been making a list and checking it twice", sending out emails to our Bryght hosted service customers and performing test moves with our sites in order to ensure the move is as seamless as possible.

On December 8th, Bryght will complete its move of all of its web infrastructure. We will be following up with a post giving a few more of the technical details but until then here is a general overview.

We are moving our servers from their old homes to our hosting infrastructure partner, Firebright, based in California. Firebright is a startup led by Jonathan Lambert that is focused on managing and delivering hosted services for companies like Bryght. Jonathan and his team are experts with years of experience at tuning the LAMP stack underneath Drupal; expertise that Bryght customers will now benefit directly from and can draw on through Bryght support.

Customers of the Bryght hosted service will enjoy new, improved, faster web servers, DNS servers, and load balancers. Also the new system is scalable which means it can easily grow to accommodate growth as the number of Bryght hosted service customers grow and Bryght rolls out new hosted services.

The Future

This move enables us to do some cool things with Drupal in the future.

For starters, we intend to upgrade the hosted service to Drupal 4.7 and to Drupal 5.0 (after Drupal 5.0 is released of course!).

Now that install profiles are part of Drupal 5 (which Bryght guy Adrian Rossouw was instrumental in), we can now more easily support additional install profiles. We've got a couple in the works already including a corporate blogging profile (which allows employees to have a group blog and an subscribe to feeds for relevant to their company) and an educational install profile e.g. one aimed at teachers offering courses.

What are Drupal install profiles? Install profiles are a way of pre-configuring Drupal for a particular market, vertical or any other niche. Once a a Drupal install profile has been created, it is much easier to create a Drupal site for the particular niche because the particular Drupal modules needed are already present with default configurations that make sense for that niche.

The current Bryght Hosted Service which we call "Bryght Light" is an instance of an install profile that we at Bryght refer to internally as "Bryght Standard".

In the future, given enough demand the Bryght Hosted Service could offer other install profiles in addition to Bryght Standard. For example, the aforementioned corporate blogging, and educational profiles, a profile for bands like Backstage, a profile for churches, the list is long!