Located in the heart of Tokyo, Waseda University is a research-intensive institution founded in 1882.
Its university faculty members share information on research results, projects, and academic conferences by creating their own websites on the Waseda WWW Service platform.
With now hundreds of user sites, Mr. Matsuura of Waseda University’s IT Strategies Division shares the challenges of managing Waseda WWW Service, and how they turned to Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting to solve them.
Read on to discover how Kinsta powered and supported Waseda University’s large-scale infrastructure project involving the migration of hundreds of sites.
The problem
Waseda University faced security concerns, inefficient site management, and a costly, complex hosting environment with their previous web hosting provider. They needed a solution to anticipate potential attacks, and take a proactive approach in securing user sites.
When asked about the goals that prompted them to change their hosting solution, Mr. Matsuura answered:
“We are constantly working to strengthen the security of our campus services, and it is imperative that we continually review and improve them.”
With that aim, they decided to focus on:
- Ensuring the security of WordPress and PHP through effective version control.
- Balancing the freedom for users to manage their sites while ensuring these sites are secure.
“Software version control is crucial to the security of WordPress and PHP. We aimed to investigate whether we could find a way to do this more safely and reliably than in the past.”
“Waseda WWW Service allows many users to create and manage their own sites with a high degree of freedom. While maintaining this flexibility, administrators have to monitor usage from a security perspective and ensure that sites are not abandoned after they are no longer needed. For example, we conduct a periodic inventory of the sites we manage. If we find unused sites, we need to take action, such as deleting them upon confirming with the user.”
Complex system and incurring high hosting cost
Dealing with overlapping systems and external service integrations complicates the daily operations of Waseda team:
“The old service had some overlapping systems for the same purpose and was intertwined with external services. Amid mounting costs for the maintenance and operation of the overall system, it was clear that we had to take action.”
“For these reasons, we gathered information in search of a new solution to ensure a secure system and a superior user experience.“
The solution
To streamline operations and resolve the issues with the old service, Waseda found Kinsta as a solution with robust security features and a strong focus on version control.
Choosing Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting
Mr. Matsuura and his team looked at a number of hosting provider candidates. They narrowed their requirements down to those that could:
- Manage software versions and vulnerabilities
- Install plugins freely on a per-site basis
- Use the WAF/CDN system already in place at the university
- Handle migration from the old service with ease
- Ease the workload of periodic site inventory and maintenance
After a thorough search, Kinsta emerged as a leading solution.
“Ultimately, Kinsta met all of these criteria, and we moved forward with testing Kinsta’s platform. It was easy to test the system with a small number of sites to check the requirements, and so the POC (proof of concept) proceeded smoothly.”
Free unlimited migrations made simple
With hundreds of user sites, migrating them all to a new platform could be a huge undertaking for Mr. Matsuura and his team. Fortunately, Kinsta offers free, unlimited migrations for WordPress sites, handled by a dedicated team of migration experts.
Kinsta’s migration team and support engineers made it easy to migrate the sites for free, which was incredibly helpful.
“I also vividly remember how receptive they were to our many detailed requests, and the fact that they were also able to handle static PHP sites and complex configurations was a great source of reassurance. And so while checking the functionality along the way, we proceeded with a phased migration.”
The result
Kinsta powers Waseda University with its secure, flexible, and easy-to-manage hosting solution that allows Waseda to guarantee a top-notch user experience (UX) while making back-end security management more efficient.
Enhanced web security and compliance
We are very happy with Kinsta. While providing users with a reasonable degree of freedom in content management, Kinsta maintains strict adherence to security requirements.
“For example, only the latest version of PHP can be used, which allows us to avoid situations where individual administrators forget to upgrade and are left with an outdated version of PHP. Automatic notification of plugin vulnerabilities is another useful feature.”
“Moving to Kinsta has taken our security to the next level. At the same time, we have been able to maintain traditional content management functions, such as uploading static files via FTP, editing pages using WordPress and installing plugins. It has also made operational tasks more efficient.”
Streamlined site management and maintenance
By centralizing site management with the MyKinsta dashboard, Waseda University has significantly reduced the time and effort needed to maintain each of its user sites.
“The nature of the university’s services means that many users will create sites according to their individual needs. That is why the process of setting up a site had to be made more efficient.”
In the past, FTP and DB account information was provided to users on physical paper or PDF documents, but after moving to Kinsta, it can now be completed easily in the ‘MyKinsta’ control panel.
Tasks that once required complex coordination or third-party services can now be handled internally with more efficiency and greater control:
“As for the site inventory process, we can now check each site’s resource usage in MyKinsta. With our old system, we had to request information from an external company, but the process has become much simpler with Kinsta.”
Kinsta supports large-scale infrastructure migration and system renewal
Kinsta handles a lot of the routine maintenance, updates, and security management so the university’s IT staff can focus on other initiatives.
“With the help of Kinsta’s migration and support engineers, we were also able to complete the migration successfully.”
“We appreciate that Kinsta provided the site migration within their normal scope of service, covering not just WordPress but also HTML static sites. It was helpful that they flexibly handled special settings particular to the old system, such as character encoding, redirect, and server-side includes (SSI) settings.”
Thanks to Kinsta, we have achieved an improved level of service (both functional and non-functional) and further enhanced security while eliminating administrative tasks. What's even more exciting is that with all of these improvements, we are able to operate and maintain our system without increasing our costs.
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