Category Archives: Pantheon

WordPress whiz Pantheon buys NodeSquirrel in cloud backup play

Pantheon has acquired NodeSquirrel, a cloud backup tech specialist

Pantheon has acquired NodeSquirrel, a cloud backup tech specialist

Pantheon, a large website managemet platform for Drupal and WordPress-based sites has acquired NodeSquirrel, a hosting provider specialising in open source cloud-based data backup technology.

NodeSquirrel provides hosting and data backup and recovery services to over 300,000 websites, and the acquisition will see Pantheon offer NodeSquirrel to its own customers for free. Some of the core NodeSquirrel team will also join Pantheon following the acquisition.

“We have always had a big vision for what could be possible with NodeSquirrel. With Pantheon’s support, those dreams are going to become reality. Our shared vision of great, easy-to-use tools for developers and agencies makes this an incredible opportunity. We are excited to join the Pantheon team,” said Drew Gorton co-founder of NodeSquirrel.

The move will give NodeSquirrel scale and Pantheon a new value-adding service to offer to existing customers. The company also said it plans larger investments into data backup and restore technology designed to handle larger file footprints and incremental backup.

Zack Rosen, Pantheon co-founder and chief executive officer said: “It’s 2015 and people are still storing backups of their website locally. If anything happens, whether that is a security attack or a natural disaster, those websites are not protected. Secure, reliable offsite backups are a fundamental best practice.”

“Acquiring NodeSquirrel gives Pantheon the ability to make secure offsite backups freely available to every Drupal website on the planet,” Rosen added.

Cloud-based data backup and recovery services are being deployed more and more in a bid to complement both online and on-premise systems. Click here to learn more about how to use the cloud for backup.

Pantheon Forks the Data Center

Pantheon, the all-in-one Drupal platform, today announced the launch of Multidev, which cuts website management costs by letting teams instantly provision unlimited development environments in the cloud. Multidev does for a company’s website what software-defined data centers do for its infrastructure. Each member of a team can fork the entire stack of services that power a site on demand, developing in tandem on a single platform. As a result, large websites launch faster and cost less to manage over time.  

Based on Pantheon’s multi-tenant containerized architecture, Multidev spins up in seconds, with no need for additional infrastructure or virtual servers. For managers, that means freedom from bugs introduced by outdated databases or platform fragmentation, and from hearing, “It worked on my machine” from their team.

For developers, the process is easy. A team member hits ‘fork’ to provision a complete cloud development environment in seconds. What used to require a separate rack of hardware, now happens in seconds via software. Whether developing, testing or handing off a stable copy of the site for review, there’s no risk of overwriting or losing data. Multidev supports feature-branching, per-developer sandboxes, dedicated quality assurance environments and more.

“With Multidev we’ve eliminated the big reasons behind website launch delays,” said Zack Rosen, CEO and co-founder of Pantheon. “Multidev delivers on the promise of a software-defined data center for website development. It gives users the ability to spin up an entire new web stack including database, caching and version control for every developer on demand. Now even extensive and complex sites can hit their launch targets.”