Managed Hosting Services | Giant Rabbit

Giant Rabbit offers managed hosting for nonprofits using Drupal, Backdrop CMS, WordPress, CiviCRM, and other applications, with a dedicated server hand-tuned to your specific needs. We provide comprehensive server maintenance and disaster recovery, so you never need to worry about site updates or backups.
It’s a core Giant Rabbit value that our clients own their own digital assets directly. With our distributed infrastructure, you’ll create and own your own AWS or DigitalOcean account, and delegate access to us so we can configure and manage your Ubuntu server for you. Our Ansible scripts allow us to maintain your server and websites efficiently and effectively.
Most web hosting for nonprofits works the other way: your site lives on a server owned by your vendor, often intermingled with their other clients. Or, your site is hosted by a third party that adds a layer of middleware between you and your server setup, which means you need to deal with limited administrative controls and service-tier upselling, instead of direct control over key technical settings like caching, memory allocation, file permissions, and more. With our unique distributed infrastructure, we set things up differently from day one because we think your assets should stay yours.
Most websites run well on a single server, but when your organization is preparing for a major fundraising campaign, a media moment, or a large membership drive, you need to know your infrastructure can handle it. We can scale your setup to be as robust as it needs to be, spanning multiple servers across different regions with load balancing if necessary. We monitor your uptime and tune your configuration until it performs the way you need it to.
We get a lot of questions from nonprofits looking for better hosting. Here are the ones that come up most.
With standard shared hosting, you’re responsible for software updates, backups, security patches, and performance, or you’re hoping your hosting provider handles them automatically (they often don’t). Managed hosting means a team actively takes care of all of that for you. At Giant Rabbit, that includes monitoring, patching, backups, and hands-on support from people who know your specific setup.
Because your infrastructure should belong to you, not your vendor. With many managed hosting arrangements, your site lives on the provider’s servers, which can limit your access to your own digital assets. If you leave, migration can be costly, or limited by contract renewal dates. . As part of our managed hosting services for nonprofits, we’ll help you set you up your own AWS or DigitalOcean account and manage it on your behalf. You’ll be the owner of record, you can grant access to anyone you want, and if you ever move on, your assets go with you.
We provide managed hosting for Drupal, Backdrop CMS, WordPress, CiviCRM, and other web applications. If you’re not sure whether we can support your stack, get in touch, and we’re happy to take a look. The answer is probably “yes.”
There are two main costs for hosting: your server itself, which you’ll pay directly to your cloud host with no markup from us, and our time keeping things up-to-date.For the server itself, it depends on how much traffic you receive all at once, and how resource-intensive your website is to run. Both AWS and Digital Ocean have highly granular pricing for different CPUs, RAM, etc., and it’s part of our onboarding process to help you choose the right size server to start with, based on your historical traffic patterns. For both of those platforms, we’ll start with a modest server, and then we’ll increase specific server resources as needed.In general, a website with no logged-in users that presents largely static content can support more simultaneous users than a site where most users are logged in and conducting resource-intensive searches and the like, but every site is different. If you’re using AWS, a majority of nonprofit websites can run for a year on $95 worth of Techsoup credits, but we can help you decide what’s needed for your site in particular.As for our time keeping things up-to-date, that varies from platform to platform (Modern Drupal is more costly to support than Backdrop CMS, for instance, because the platform changes more rapidly), and from site to site (more plugins/extensions/complexity usually means more to test and more to fix as the code base changes over time). We’ll provide an estimate for your site in particular, and we’ll provide transparent hourly billing so you can see exactly what we’re doing and why.
Yes. We take on existing sites regularly. Before we start, we’ll conduct a technical onboarding process to learn how your site is set up, flag and remediate security issues, set up test and staging environments, and add your site to our system administration infrastructure so that we can support it the same way we would a site we built ourselves.As part of onboarding, we’ll work with you to develop a detailed test plan that covers the things that matters most for your users, as well as any places where your site has been broken or haunted in the past. That means paying special attention to any time we’re charging a credit card, updating a membership record, granting or revoking access, and so on. Once we’ve onboarded your site and developed our test plan, we’re all set to make changes with confidence, respond to security challenges, recover from a hardware issue (or a well-meaning comms intern who accidentally deletes your homepage), and keep things running indefinitely.
Definitely. During onboarding, we’ll create a test plan so we can check your site for problems after every update. If there’s a part of your site that’s broken in the past, let us know and we’ll include in the test plan. It’s our goal to make updates a non-event, and most of the time you won’t even know they’ve happened.
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