Pantheon And NodeSquirrel Join Forces

Pantheon, a popular website management platform for Drupal and WordPress, announced today that they have acquired NodeSquirrel , a free backup service for Drupal sites. NodeSquirrel, launched in 2012, and was originally developed as an extension for Drupal but quickly took off and is now used by more than 300,000 websites.

NodeSquirrel is an excellent example of someone creating a product to handle their own needs, only to watch it explode into something bigger. Drew Gorton, co-founder of Nodesquirrel says, “In 2007 Ronan wrote the Backup and Migrate module to make his life easier as he pushed databases around between sites and environments. He shared it with the world later that year and—as it turns out—others had the same needs. Backup and Migrate took off and is now one of the top 20 Drupal modules…” Ronan Dowling is the brain and lead developer at Gorton Studios as well as the creator of the popular Backup and Migrate Drupal module.

Pantheon, founded in 2010, claims to host over 100,000 Drupal and WordPress sites. The platform run by Pantheon provides users with scalable and reliable hosting, but part of the core requirements for a hosting platform is possessing the ability to automate website backup. This is where NodeSquirrel comes in handy.

With the acquisition of NodeSquirrel by Pantheon, existing users of Backup and Migrate will be able to store all of their backups on Pantheon free of charge. Additionally, core team members of the Backup and Migrate team – like Gorton and Dowling, among others – will be joining the Pantheon team. According to Pantheon, paying NodeSquirrel customers will see an increase in their storage allowances.

The company intends to keep investing in the initiative and support a variety of backup destinations such as FTP, S3, and more in addition to NodeSquirrel. The financial details of this acquisition have not been revealed, so as far as anyone knows, NodeSquirrel hasn’t taken any outside investments.