Acquia Cloud is a solid hands-off approach to Drupal Hosting
December 28, 2022

Acquia Cloud is a solid hands-off approach to Drupal Hosting

Mike Holzer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Drupal Cloud

Modules Used

  • Cloud Platform

Overall Satisfaction with Acquia Digital Experience Platform

My company uses Acquia Digital Experience Platform Cloud as our website host for four of our sites. We are in the process of developing a 5th site which will also be hosted on Acquia cloud. Acquia Digital Experience Platform cloud take a lot of the support needs out of our hands so that we can focus on our teams' core competencies - site development and content. We have several sites not hosted on Acquia and they take far more time to maintain than our Acquia-hosted sites. I am used to having a more hands-on approach to server hosting (AWS, Digital Ocean, etc) so I personally struggle with the somewhat blackbox-iness of Acquia Cloud. At the same time, there are fewer opportunities to make a mistake affecting the server, so it's definitely a net benefit for our sites and their stability.
  • Great Uptime
  • Great Customer Support
  • Simple platform interface
  • Documentation
  • Could use more configuration"recipes"
  • Savings on hosting support expenses (i.e. an expanded NetOps support team)
Once we had access to a new application, we were able to deploy new code to the application within a few hours. We had some difficulty configuring our git deployment pipeline to work, but Acquia customer support helped us track down the issue and troubleshoot until the issue was resolved. Once the bug was squashed, we were able to have our CICD pushing code lickety-split.
We've never had our sites crash due to unexpected traffic - the services simply take the traffic and keep on ticking. We've had to adjust the level of service provided on occasion, but that's a good problem to have. Acquia allows us to focus on driving traffic and delivering content, and not on keeping the servers updated or worrying about load balancers.
Acquia Cloud is more of a hands-off approach to Drupal hosting - get the code on the server and that's basically it. AWS on the other hand requires more specialized server and networking knowledge to support a site. Our company wants to focus on content deliver and not on being a "server support" organization, so Acquia makes more sense for us.

Do you think Acquia Digital Experience Platform delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Acquia Digital Experience Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Acquia Digital Experience Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Acquia Digital Experience Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Acquia Digital Experience Platform again?

Yes

Acquia Cloud is well suited for organizations and teams without the ability to support their own hosting, such as on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. If a team has the ability (and desire) to manage it themselves, I'm not sure I would recommend it. However, if your team needs reliable, hands-off Drupal hosting, I would definitely recommend Acquia Cloud. Once a deployment pipeline is configured, it's very nearly set-and-forget as far as server configuration is concerned.

Acquia Digital Experience Platform Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
Not Rated
Code quality / cleanliness
Not Rated
Admin section
Not Rated
Page templates
Not Rated
Library of website themes
Not Rated
Mobile optimization / responsive design
Not Rated
Publishing workflow
Not Rated
Form generator
Not Rated
Content taxonomy
Not Rated
SEO support
Not Rated
Bulk management
Not Rated
Availability / breadth of extensions
Not Rated
Community / comment management
Not Rated
API
Not Rated
Internationalization / multi-language
Not Rated
Not Rated
Role-based user permissions
Not Rated