If you are familiar at using Drupal and have a Drupal CMS in place then Acquia is the right type of hosting for you. Unfortunately the flexibility of Acquia stops there are they only cater for Drupal customers. The features are basic but offer good functionality, and everything is based in the Acquia cloud which provides scalability, superb performance and very tight security. They offer free and paid for plans.
Why Choose Acquia Cloud Hosting?
Want to know if Acquia Cloud Hosting is right for you?
All the servers are set nicely in the cloud and Acquia claim that high performance and security are the fundamental points of focus. The servers range from single-server setups to multi-server setups that are fully managed with 99.5% uptime. All the servers are monitored by best practices to ensure that everything ticks over smoothly.
There are four main areas to each hosting solution offered by Acquia, they are the cloud environment, insight, content services and global support. Each paid plan will give you Drupal-tuned LAMP stack and automated workflow which will either be served up on a single-instance cloud environment or a multi-instance environment.
Code analysis, custom tests, configuration monitoring and site uptime monitoring are just some of the features that you will see across the developer and enterprise packages.
Storage ranges from 10GB up to 1,000GB and HA RAID, where instances range from 1ECU (1.7GB) through to 26ECU (68.4GB). Both Instances and Storage are easily customisable.
With such expensive services on offer the support has to meet the quality that you would expect, and it really does go above and beyond. Acquia have every kind of support option you can think of, from sales telephone numbers, to tech phone numbers, right through to live chat facilities and social media avenues to take your questions down.
Depending on what plan you’re on, depends on the level of service you get. If you are going to be paying $1,000+ you will be able to benefit from 24×7 emergency support lines and 1 hour response times for any critical issues.
Access is also available to community forums, podcasts and how-to articles.
There is nowhere in between when we look at the pricing structure at Acquia, on the one hand you have access to a free cloud hosting solution that offer a development sandbox with powerful tools. Then on the other hand you have a fully customisable pricing band where you have the capability to select different storage capacities, support access, and instances. The very basic plan will cost you $134 per month; however moving the sliders to max on all the options will cost you up to $2,000 per month.
Acquia caters only for Drupal CMS so its very restricted on features and tools, however most of the plans on offer seem to target a more advanced audience to that of a beginner skill set. If you are a novice then you are probably going to find yourself getting lost around the site and the whole hosting environment.
Having said that, if you are experienced with Drupal, which I imagine most of you looking at a Drupal focused hosting platform would be, then you should cope pretty well with Acquia.
It comes down to one question, are you looking for a dedicated Drupal host or not? If you are then this is the service to get because you are not going to get much better than Acquia whose primary focus is the Drupal CMS. If your answer is no, then there really is no point reading on.
Prices can get expensive, but as a starter you can take a look at the cloud free option which offers some great features, support and reliability. For developers and enterprises the prices vary from the hundreds to the thousands, but each plan is customisable down to a granular level.
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