Battle-tested Drupal website availability

In this talk, Graham Cole from Webcurl shares hard-won lessons from running LocalGov Drupal hosting for multiple councils, including Bracknell Forest, Bath and North East Somerset, and Wirral. Graham covers the full stack of availability and performance challenges – from baseline Drupal configuration through to CDN strategy, bot mitigation, and scaling for high-traffic events like elections. What's covered: Baseline production Drupal configuration for reliability Reverse proxy caching and CDNs – Webcurl's experience with Fastly and an honest cost/benefit analysis Performance and uptime monitoring – how to measure what matters Dealing with aggressive bot crawling (a particular issue with LocalGov Directories) and emerging threats from the AI ecosystem Scalable architectures for high-traffic periods such as elections Security against DDoS attacks and protecting origin servers A practical, real-world session for developers, DevOps engineers, and anyone responsible for keeping council websites running under pressure.