Case Study: Sunshine State News achieves scalable, enterprise-grade Drupal performance and managed hosting with Acquia

Sunshine State News - Customer Case Study

Sunshine State News is a Florida-based online news start-up that wanted a modern, media-rich site with editorial workflows, user-contributed multimedia, granular permissions, and the ability to launch content-rich on day one. With no legacy platform to migrate, the team evaluated open-source options and chose Drupal, then needed a development partner and enterprise-grade support to ensure scalability and easy content management.

Blink Reaction built the site on Acquia Drupal, creating custom modules for YouTube integration, multimedia uploading/encoding, ProsePoint-based editorial workflows, and marketing integrations, while Acquia provided managed hosting, support and remote administration. The site went live in March 2010 and successfully handled a viral scoop that drove nearly 50,000 visits in a day—Acquia scaled resources quickly, minimizing disruption—and Sunshine State News has continued to grow and syndicate content while focusing on journalism rather than infrastructure.

Sunshine State News

Lane Wright

Senior Reporter