Interview with Berend de Boer - Xplain hosting

What is your elevator pitch?

Customers: once your site has been developed, it ordinarily becomes abandonware for developers.

You're at great risk from security vulnerabilities unless your site is patched regularly. We will automatically patch Drupal core + supported modules.

Another risk is changes introduced after development has finished. We give you a staging site, you can test/see changes from a developer, but a button is pushed to automatically update the live site.

Developers: developers face having to keep several sites in sync: their own machine(s), the staging, and the live site.

Through SVN we make that very simple. Our control panel also allows you to easily manage the staging and live sites, and propagate changes between them. If you work with multiple developers and multiple sites, we also allow you to specify what developers have what rights. All in all, developing Drupal sites and bringing them live has become a great deal easier.

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Best value Drupal hosting at unbeatable prices.

Why did you choose to sponsor DrupalSouth?

To attract new customers.

What have you contributed to Drupal (or Open Source)?

I've contributed both a base theme, YUI Grid, and two small modules.

What products or services do you offer?

My company offers Drupal hosting. As this doesn't need my full time attention, I also work as Drupal contractor for other companies. Works various from pixel perfect theme development to advanced Drupal modules, third party integration, and database migration.

What can you offer to other users of Drupal? Developers? Designers? Site owners? Others?
What other similar services or products exist in the Drupal marketplace? What stands yours apart from the rest?

Everyone knows Acquia of course, who also offers Drupal hosting. But they're more targeted at really big companies. We target smaller companies and Drupal developers who seek hosting for their clients. We are unique in that we offer a development support process and tools around Drupal hosting. For example a check-in into SVN will automatically update the staging site, nothing needed from a developer. You can leave Drupal's CSS/JS caching enabled, we even flush the cache after an SVN check-in to make sure the staging site accurately reflects what's in SVN.

Also we do not just chop up one server into parts and everyone gets a piece. Because we're hosted in the clouds, additional servers kick in when the load gets too high. The scalability you can achieve there is fantastic.

How can DrupalSouth attendees contact you, use your services or get involved?

Contact: support@xplainhosting.com.