Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Cloudways vs. GoDaddy

It made it super easy to upgrade 300+ Drupal sites to the latest major version in 12 weeks, end to end. It is easy to deploy legal changes and updates to components at scale. Turnkey service to deploy new environments and to clone sites. There are no ecosystem lock-in principles for Customer service/success services and professional services for new approaches.

Incentivized

When you dont know how to set up a cloud server technically, (The LAMP stack or the PHP settings etc) Cloudways comes handy. You can easily modify the server settings with one click.

Less Appropriate - If you want to save costs, go for direct cloud providers. Setting up technical stuff is a one time job.

Incentivized

Good for transferring over an existing site. Truth be told, I haven't used it for building a brand new site-- I know that this is a fairly common thing but I just never needed it. For what I've used it for, it has worked well. For a small business with anyone with a little bit of technical skill, it's surprisingly good.

Incentivized

• It's fast, no lag time
• Exceptionally good support. When there's a problem, you reach out to your account manager who either fixes the issue or gets you to the right person. We've had no downtime.
• Platform is very accessible to those who know how to manage the back end software.

Incentivized

• Automatic Daily One Click Restore Backups
• Integrated CDN
• Easy & Intuitive Alternate Interface to cPanel and WHM
• Very Affordable for High Specs
• 24/7 Customer Support is Extremely Helpful
• Serve & Application Management is a Breeze
• Choose from Multiple Server Locations

• Registering a domain - I've found their site to be the easiest to navigate
• Website builder - their website builder is user friendly
• Email hosting - easy to set up and use, wether in an email app or online email.
• Wordpress hosting - I have multiple wordpress sites I use under one account
• Their customer service is always very helpful and easy to contact.

Incentivized

• Support responds pretty quickly to critical tickets, but they can be slow to respond on non-urgent items. Some of what we experienced may have been related to a newer ticketing system recently implemented.
• Standard support covers business days/hours but only critical support is available outside those times. We typically schedule our website updates for the weekend or "off" hours when only critical support is available.

Incentivized

• Their free alternative to WP Rocket could be made more user-friendly and easier to understand
• Create a function to automatically report heavy usage to specific email IDs

Incentivized

• Support agents are woefully undertrained, even in knowledge of their own products.
• Support agents will always try to upsell you, even when you're dealing with an urgent, high-impact issue.
• There's no guarantee of uptime, and there will often be gaps in service as part of normal procedures.

Incentivized

We're moving away from Drupal as a platform. Drupal 8 and 9 were simply too overburdened and difficult to maintain compared to other offerings. PHP seems like a dying language so we are currently in the process of migrating all of our Drupal 7 functionality and custom modules to a Python/Django/Wagtail platform. This doesn't mean Acquia isn't a great service, they are professional and top-knotch, but the only way we'd say with them is if I didn't complete the migration.

Incentivized

We can't really choose anyone else and the cost/effort of moving all of the hosted data would be extremely large, and we just have to stick to them, and hope they improve service

Incentivized

It's a great user interface. It's always being updated and I've never noticed a bad update that increased the complexity or reduced

Incentivized

They are constantly improving their dashboards and interface to make it easier to use and find the things that we use the most. It's a lot of features to pack in to one UI and they have done a great job of making it user friendly. Their layout is intuitive and easy to learn and is extremely granular. We are able to control every aspect of our websites and applications from an individual level from scaling, to cache, to DNS, security, WAF, and everything in between.

Incentivized

Some integration could be much cleaner and smoother. Seems it used to be easier. Plus, they took away the catch all email feature.

Incentivized

Every time we have had an issue, Acquia support has responded promptly and worked with us as a team to solve the problem. The Acquia support team is global and we have literally had interactions with all of their support offices, yet the experience has been the same - top notch

Incentivized

Technical support is just 2-3 clicks away and the Cloudways homepage and the operators are available almost 24/7. They also are able to answer any kind of question related to their services, whether economical or technical. I sometimes made mistakes while using their services and they have been keen to help me, and fixed my problems really fast.

I think a lot of companies can learn from GoDaddy's support team. I have found:

• Chat or phone support is almost always available.
• Their agents are friendly and helpful.
• Their agents seem to care and be knowledgeable about a wide range of issues.
• I rarely have to escalate my problem to get the support that I need.
• If they can't help me, then they can tell me why something is happening and direct me to resources that can fix my problem.

Incentivized

It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.

Incentivized

We chose Acquia for a much better UI that gave non-analytical marketers and easy to use tool where they could create their own reports. The campaign side of things also had an easier to use UI as well, that made the targeting of audiences much easier.

Incentivized

DigitalOcean: harder to set up, hands-on maintenance and controll, but needs work-hours of a linux expert. GoDaddy: absolutely worst of all providers, charges stupid people money for nothing-services. Horrible products in my opinion. HostGator: okay-ish hosting, nowhere to the power of Cloudways, the customer support also is much less knowledgeable. I would advise against all managed hostings. Go managed-cloud instead.

Incentivized

We use Wix currently for our online store. It is nice and easy to use, but they don't offer the email domains as well (the last time we checked). They have pretty decent customization of the web page, but still limited. We're going to try it with GoDaddy, since we have other services from them already. It just doesn't make sense to pay two different companies for something we can do with one.

Incentivized

The DXP tools can handle millions of requests and can scale automatically to fit your needs. We have clients that use only part of the DXP tools and have a small usage, but even in these cases they see great value in using tools like personalization and CDP.

Incentivized

• Acquia has helped us to stabilize and optimize our website performance, lowering page load times and dramatically decreasing the frequency of issues experienced by end-users.
• Acquia SOLR search provided a much-improved search experience on our website.
• Acquia's PCI-compliant hosting has helped us to remain compliant and cyber-secure.
• We are working to implement Acquia Site Studio and Acquia Personalization now and expect those to improve our operation agility and ability to drive more relevant experiences to our various website visitors.

Incentivized

• We were able to reduce load on our main server.
• By migrating social sentiment platform to cloudways, we were able to scale and run it effeciently.
• It saved lot of time as well in terms of server management.

Incentivized

• GoDaddy reduces our ROI by costing me in non-billable hours. I don't charge clients for sitting on the phone with tech support to power cycle the server or fix the php.ini file, so my $/hr takes a hit.
• Their nickel&dime strategy requires I have an additional conversation with clients about their max recurring fees. Small as they are, I need approval for upping their bill. GoDaddy is only the cheap option if you don't value security, stability, or performance.

Incentivized