Hosting and Maintenance Options

Because the Drupal for Legal Aid Websites (DLAW) is free and open source software based on Drupal, anyone can freely download, install, and maintain the software.

However, for those organizations who do not have dedicated technical staff, support is also available. Optional website hosting, regular software updates, and support is available through DLAW's technology partner, Urban Insight. Urban Insight is a technology consulting firm that helped to develop DLAW.

Following are the various hosting and maintenance options Urban Insight provides. If this page contains too much technical information for your taste, please fill out the form on the Contact page, and a friendly team member will call you back and discuss the verious hosting and maintenance options. We can then recommend an option that is likely to be a good fit for your needs.

Choice of TWO Maintenance Options

A primary goal in designing DLAW is to offer a flexible set of options to meet the needs for all types of legal aid organizations – from those that prefer to run the DLAW without modification and be fully supported by Urban Insight, to those that prefer to modify DLAW and may only occasionally need assistance from Urban Insight. We have achieved this by defining two ways you can use the DLAW: Managed and Basic Maintenance. Following are the highlights of each type of arrangement.

Managed

• This option is intended for organizations which prefer the convenience of having UI handle most aspects of hosting and managing their DLAW Drupal website.
• UI will manage the site by updating DLAW, modules and themes when patches are released (typically monthly).
• Organization will not have FTP access.
• Organization can contract with UI to evaluate, install or develop, and enable additional modules, customize themes, or other custom requests. After six months of testing, these modules will be available to the OST community as part of DLAW.
• Site is hosted by UI.

Basic Maintenance

• This option is intended for organizations which prefer the flexibility of installing or developing their own themes, modules, content types, or making other Drupal modifications, but would like UI to assist in keeping the DLAW website up to date.
• Organization will have FTP access.
• Organization is responsible for updating custom themes and additional modules.
• Organization will be responsible for addressing conflicts and bugs or UI can provide support on a time and materials basis.
• UI will provide hourly technical support on request.
• Site can be hosted by UI or by a third party.

Pricing

Any legal aid organization can download and use DLAW at no charge. The following pricing is offered by Urban Insight for those organizations that would like to engage UI to provide installation and setup support, website hosting, Drupal maintenance and additional services.

Website Hosting

* Under the Basic Maintenance plan, you can host your DLAW website with a compatible hosting provider of your choice. (See DLAW Hosting Specifications, below.)

Site/Drupal Maintenance

*Support refers to hourly support for website updates, telephone or email support, training, and other consulting services to assist in managing your DLAW website, once it has been installed and configured.

Installation and Configuration

DLAW Hosting Specificatinos

We recommend that DLAW be hosted on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache MySQL, PHP). If you are searching for third-party hosting, we recommend that you select hosting that offers the following minimum requirements:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or CentOS
• Apache 2 web server
• MySQL 5 database
• PHP 5
• Disk Space: Minimum of 350 MB for DLAW (10MB) and your site files (250MB).
• Bandwidth: 10GB-100GB (or more, depending on your website).
• Security: Software firewall recommended.
• FTP access.
• Root access recommended, but not required.
• Hosting control panel access.
• Access to httpd and php logs.
• Daily backups with minimum 2 week retention.
• MySQL backups with minimum 2 week retention.
• Virtual (1GB memory) sever, cloud server, or dedicated server hosting. We do not recommend shared hosting, generally.
• 99.95% or greater network uptime service level agreement.

If you would like Urban Insight to setup Drupal OST Base on your third-party host, we will require the following information: control panel URL; control panel username/password; domain name registrar; registrar username/password; ftp address; ftp username and password.

DLAW Maintenance & Technical Support

Through January 1, 2011, UI will be responsible for maintaining the DLAW Base. Whenever Drupal releases a security patch or update for Drupal Core, Drupal Core Modules, or the DLAW-selected Drupal modules, UI will:

• Test the Drupal updates for conflicts with the other DLAW Base components.
• Update the national reference DLAW Base website.
• Update the DLAW code repository.
• Release a package of the updated DLAW Base.
• Announce release of the updated package on the national reference DLAW website (www.legalaidtech.org).
• Notify via email all registered organizations participating in the DLAW program that new packages are available.
• Update DLAW websites using the Managed model.
• Schedule and update DLAW websites using the Basic Maintenance model.