George Mason University
Managed cloud hosting and WordPress care for one of the country's largest university WordPress ecosystems, so GMU's IT team can stay focused on the work only they can do.
- Engaged
- 2018
- Relationship
- Ongoing
- Platform
- WordPress
- Sector
- Higher Education
The Brief
Hundreds of WordPress sites, and a university IT team carrying all of it themselves.
George Mason University is Virginia's largest, an R1 research institution with five campuses and a sprawling WordPress ecosystem to match. When we came in, more than 250 of those sites lived on locally administered servers, and the in-house IT team was spending more and more of its time keeping the lights on. Every hour spent patching a plugin or chasing a server alert was an hour not spent on the work the university actually needed them on.
The Solution
We took over the hosting and the upkeep, so their team got their time back.
Materiell migrated the entire ecosystem onto managed cloud infrastructure we run, then stepped into the role of caring for it. Hosting, security, monitoring, and WordPress updates across the whole fleet now come from us. The ecosystem has grown to more than 340 sites under our care since then, and we have been doing this for GMU since 2018.
Managed infrastructure
The whole ecosystem, hosted in a cloud environment we run.
Every site sits in a secure managed cloud environment Materiell operates end to end. Encrypted storage, backups, uptime monitoring, and a permissions model that respects how the university is actually organized across departments and campuses. GMU's team does not have to think about where any of it lives or who is watching it. When something needs attention, we are already on it.
Managed WordPress updates
WordPress stays current across hundreds of sites, on a schedule.
Patching WordPress and its plugins on one site is routine. Doing it on hundreds of sites without breaking something is its own discipline. We patch core and plugins across the whole ecosystem on a regular cadence, test updates before they reach live, and roll back cleanly if anything looks off. The university gets a fleet that stays current and stays whole, without anyone on their side tracking version numbers.
Figures
340+
Sites under our care
Grown from 250+ at migration to more than 340 across five campuses today.
8+
Years of partnership
Hosting and caring for the ecosystem since 2018.
Tech Stack
What it runs on.
A WordPress ecosystem of more than 340 sites, hosted on Google Cloud in an enterprise managed environment Materiell operates and patches on a regular cadence.
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