@Domains - Wanted - I have gotten most of what you have said. But I don't really understand this "spin up, build, say 10 Drupal VPS servers in minutes"...
My apologies for my shorthand,
@stub, neccesarily for brevity's sake. I did include most of the tools' names for further reading, should anyone be interested in learning more.
...Why would you need to do that for a DFS website? Or am I missing something?
No, you are perfectly correct,
@stub. I mentioned "10 Drupal VP servers" for example. Although with lots of testing, modeling going into this, trying out
Drupal's existing modules (why reinvent the wheel?), I do run a number of
Drupal test servers. Another couple are in the process of being set up for clients' and friends websites to test some stuff in the wild, so to speak. Plus a couple of Drupal servers for my contractors. I'm also running 2 additional Ansible hosts plus a couple remote hosts apiece, where outsourced work can be implemented and tested by contractors, before my migrating it to "my" Ansible production server. This leaves me 100% in control, while making it possible to outsource any work I find too difficult or time consuming... or boring or I'm just too lazy to do myself
Personally, I think Drupal is way too insecure, IMHO.
Actually,
Drupal is one of the more secure, if not the most secure CMS. Properly maintained and updated, of course. This process can be fully automated, although many people don't bother or maybe lack the knowhow to do so.
A great CMS though. You could really build a great DFS website with it. But it does seem like overkill
I agree. For standard,
Efty or
Undeveloped type DFS landing pages,
Drupal is overkill. In fact,
Drupal is overkill for most people's needs and has the learning curve to match its sophistication. Especially if you want to take advantage of its most powerful feature and automation tool -
Drush - that sets it apart from WP or Joomla.
WP, Drupal, any CMS, adds way too much overhead, IMHO.
Once again, no argument here. An SQL database (
SQLite will do) as backend and a simple PHP script will do the trick admirably. Using a PHP framework like
CakePHP adds considerable overhead, but makes building the application from scratch much easier and well organized.
My simple solution to this is to separate the backends (the database and PHP application servers) from the frontend (
Nginx coupled with
Varnish reverse proxy/cache), serving static HTML pages literally thousands of times more efficiently
Not to mention keeping on serving websites days or weeks on end even when the whole backend kaboodle goes down on you for one reason or another
Plus making for much better security (backends are not visible from the internet) and simpliying implementation of LetsEncrypt SSL's on every single domain/website.