George Mason University
Infrastructure management and care for the WordPress ecosystems of Virginia’s largest public research university. The students, faculty, and community who rely on these sites deserve platforms that stay current, secure, and available.
- Engaged
- 2018
- Relationship
- Ongoing
- Platform
- WordPress
- Sector
- Education
The Brief
Hundreds of WordPress sites and a university IT team trying to keep up with all of them.
George Mason University is Virginia’s largest R1 research institution with five campuses and a sprawling WordPress ecosystem to match. When we started, the sites lived on locally administered servers, and the in-house IT team was spending the bulk of its time keeping the lights on. Every hour spent patching a plugin or chasing a server alert was an hour pulled away from the infrastructure and projects the university needed them focused on.
The Solution
We took over the hosting and the upkeep, so their team got their time back.
We migrated the entire ecosystem onto our managed cloud infrastructure and stepped into the ongoing role of caring for it. Hosting, security, monitoring, and WordPress updates all come from us. The ecosystem has grown from 250 to more than 340 production sites under our care, with continuous engagement since 2018.
Managed infrastructure
Their whole WordPress ecosystem now runs in one managed environment.
Every site runs on managed cloud infrastructure, and we handle the day-to-day of keeping it healthy: encrypted storage, backups, uptime monitoring, and a permissions model built around how the university is organized across departments and campuses. GMU’s team stays focused on the university’s broader IT priorities. When something needs attention, we are already on it.
Managed WordPress updates
WordPress stays current across hundreds of sites, on a schedule.
Updating WordPress and its plugins on one site is routine. Doing it across hundreds of sites while keeping every one of them stable is its own discipline. We patch core and plugins across the whole ecosystem on a regular cadence, test updates before they reach production, and roll back cleanly if anything looks off. The university gets an ecosystem that stays current and stays whole, and no one on the IT team has to track a single version number.
Stewardship
The same team, year after year.
This is the quiet kind of work that rarely makes a case study, and it is most of what keeps an ecosystem this size healthy. We have cared for GMU’s WordPress sites since 2018, through client staff changes and an ecosystem that has grown from 250 production sites to more than 340. Most weeks the university team barely hears from us. That is the point. The sites are up, current, and looked after, and their team stays focused on the university’s broader IT priorities.
Figures
340+
Sites under our care
The ecosystem has grown from 250+ production sites at migration to more than 340 across five campuses today.
8+
Years of partnership
We have hosted and cared for the ecosystem continuously since 2018.
Tech Stack
What it runs on.
A WordPress ecosystem of more than 340 production sites, hosted on Google Cloud in an enterprise managed environment Materiell operates and patches on a regular cadence.
Next Project
Medicare Payment Advisory Commission
A content-rich WordPress site and a searchable document library built for an independent commission that advises Congress.
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