Acquia Hosting Features
Drupal-Optimized Managed Hosting Service
The simplicity you want. The reliability and security you demand.
High performance
Acquia Hosting is a multi-tenant environment built for optimum Drupal site performance. By taking advantage of a dynamically available shared pool of infrastructure resources, your Drupal site will perform better at much lower cost than a custom built alternative, and benefit from continuous platform improvements.
Fully managed hosting
Each component in the Acquia Hosting architecture represents a pool of server resources controlled by the Acquia's operations team. By centrally managing all of the infrastructure and software layers, Acquia delivers your Drupal hosting platform as a service, simplifying site operations and eliminating operations headaches for your web team.
Drupal optimized
Because we host only Drupal websites, Acquia Hosting is tuned specifically for Drupal performance. Your site benefits from higher PHP memory allotment, Drupal-specific LAMP stack tuning, automatic high availability database configuration, opcode caching and much more. The result is faster dynamic content rendering and improved site reliability.
Drupal infrastructure, simplified.
Acquia Hosting offers everything you need to run a dynamic, high performance, scalable Drupal website. And, because Acquia delivers this infrastructure as a service, you are able to reduce your costs and simplify your site management efforts. Click around to understand how Acquia Hosting works.
Smart Routing Layer
Technologies: Varnish, Nginx
This is the entry point for all requests coming into the Acquia Hosting service. Requests of every size flow through this high performance caching and routing proxy layer.
Your Drupal site contains a combination of static and dynamic content. The Drupal application has native caching support and your site will see a huge performance boost when application and infrastructure caching are working together seamlessly. If the requested content is available in the static cache, the cache returns the request immediately.
When dynamic content is requested, this layer is tuned for high performance and handles HTTP-level processing, including SSL and file store requests for anonymous visitors, before passing connections immediately into the stack. We manage the front-end servers, including DNS, load balancing, and fail-over across the machines to ensure optimum site responsiveness.
Drupal Engine Layer
Technologies: Drupal
This is where Acquia Hosting makes your Drupal site shine. The Drupal Engine Layer is built to deliver outstanding performance on high traffic Drupal websites.
When running inside the Drupal Engine Layer, your code takes advantage of a expandable pool of web server resources to ensure your dynamic content elements load fast. We scale our Drupal Engine Layer independently from your Drupal site and we maintain excess capacity in reserve, enabling our web servers to respond in real time to changing traffic patterns and unexpected bursts. As a result, we are able to maximize the amount of PHP memory available to your site at any time, improving performance of your dynamic page elements across your site.
The LAMP stack components in this layer are configured for optimal Drupal performance. Additionally, we use opcode caching to save compiled PHP code and reduce dynamic page load times. The result is your site performs better when you need it most.
Drupal developers access their code on Acquia Hosting via hosted SVN repositories for source code version control. Check out code for local development, push to staging for functional testing and finally push live to your production site directly from your dedicated SVN repository.
Cloud Services Layer
Technologies: MySQL, GlusterFS, Exim, Acquia Search
The Cloud Services layer is a robust set of back-end resources designed to improve scalability, performance, and reliability of your Drupal website, as well as connect into additional cloud-based services to extend your site's capabilities.
Our MySQL database layer is tuned for Drupal and automatically configured for high availability, offering redundancy through an active / passive setup. Our fault tolerant network file system optimizes static file request routing based on access privileges, eliminating database calls when possible.
We have implemented a consistent hot backup process, with four hour snapshots taken directly off the running servers to eliminate partially complete backups that cannot be restored. Additionally, on a nightly basis, the latest snapshot of your site and data is made available as a customer downloadable file from the Acquia Network.
We offer reliable email services via an Exim-based email delivery service. This is intended for low-volume uses such as registration or verifications email. For email campaigns and other high-volume email uses, we can work with you to find the right partner.
Additionally, your Drupal site will benefit from a direct connection to services from the Acquia Network, including Acquia Search. Because Acquia Hosting is connected directly to the Acquia Network, your site will experience better performance from cloud-based services that extend your Drupal site and improve your visitors' user experience.
Secure Infrastructure Layer
Technologies: Amazon Web Services
Acquia's managed hosting environment takes advantage of industry leading cloud computing platforms to provide the highest levels of security, fault-tolerance and operational controls possible in the cloud. Acquia Hosting is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver enterprise-class security on a SAS70 certified platform, ensuring your data is protected by industry standard operational and security controls at all times. Our operations team maintains our hosting infrastructure to protect your data with HMAC authentication policies, automated security monitoring, automated backup and data retention, breach notifications, and support for SSL certificates.
AWS provides a highly reliable cloud computing infrastructure with 99.95% uptime and the elasticity necessary to quickly respond to changing traffic conditions. Utilizing a combination of AWS and custom built monitoring tools, the operations team at Acquia conducts 24X7 monitoring of all server environment components, notifying customers immediately of environment changes that impact their site.
Additionally, you can protect network communications from your site by adding SSL certificates to your Drupal site, encrypting and protecting your data while in transit.
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