Case Study: Human Rights Watch achieves reliable scaling and reduced maintenance with Pantheon

Reporting for the Greater Good on Pantheon

Human Rights Watch is a global nonprofit that produces hundreds of investigative reports each year, and its website must reliably reach wide audiences—especially during frequent, unpredictable traffic spikes. Maintaining on-premise servers and supporting a large Drupal 6→7 migration consumed roughly half of a senior engineer’s work week, creating a need for a more scalable, low-maintenance platform that could support 90+ editors and multilingual content.

HRW migrated its Drupal and WordPress sites to Pantheon, using Multidev environments and hands-on support from Pantheon’s team to complete the complex migration and streamline workflows. The result: the site stayed up through major spikes (including the annual World Report), security and uptime improved, maintenance time fell dramatically, and the small dev team regained time to build features and improve the user experience.

Human Rights Watch

Mihai Cuibus

Senior Digital Engineering of Human Rights Watch