An institution does not have a website. It has hundreds, owned by people who do not report to each other, and they all get busy on the same three days a year.
University traffic is not seasonal in the gentle sense. It is flat, then vertical, on dates published a year in advance.
Everyone arrives within the same hour on dates everybody already knows. Capacity is arranged around that published calendar rather than around an average that never occurs.
Research pages, course archives and old prospectuses are cited long after nobody maintains them. They stay served and backed up rather than being cleared out to keep an install manageable.
A faculty administrator needs to publish without a central ticket and without reaching another department. Roles are delegated per site, which is what makes a network of this size survivable.
Central brand and accessibility standards apply across every site, while departmental content stays theirs. Updates roll out from one place rather than eighty.
A researcher leaves and their project site remains, uncredentialed and unpatched. Platform-level updates keep those sites maintained even when nobody is watching them.
Every university IT team has sites they discovered rather than provisioned. The job is making the whole estate safe by default rather than auditing it one department at a time.
An institution's whole year of hosting is judged on one hour, when every applicant, parent and journalist loads the same handful of pages at once.
The shape is fixed by an academic calendar and an estate that grew rather than being designed.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity planning | Reserved against published academic dates | Results, clearing and enrolment days are known a year ahead and produce the only load that matters, so planning against an average is planning for the wrong hour. |
| Archive retention | Old content kept served rather than pruned | Research and course pages are cited for decades, and clearing them to keep an install tidy breaks links in published work. |
| Role delegation | Scoped per departmental site | A faculty administrator must be able to publish without a central ticket, and without the ability to reach another department's content. |
| Estate-wide updates | Applied at the platform rather than per site | Every institution has sites nobody remembers provisioning, and those are the ones running unpatched when a vulnerability lands. |
| Central templates | Brand and accessibility standards pushed from one source | Accessibility obligations apply to the whole estate, so leaving eighty departments to implement them independently guarantees gaps. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the institution across — migration is free, every departmental site included.