Item: Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Rating: 9
Author: Greg Morris

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We host a website for one of our recently acquired subsidiaries on the Acquia platform. We inherited the website and since we have no internal Drupal expertise, we wanted to continuing hosting with a company that specialized in Drupal websites. We depend on Acquia to keep the server up-to-date in terms of OS and Drupal specific core and security patches.

Pros and Cons

Acquia keeps the site up and available. I don't think we've had a second of downtime caused by Acquia.
Their administration UI makes it pretty easy to manage the websites at a high level. Check stats, change key configuration values, backup code and databases, manage SSL, create support tickets and manage development teams (users).
Their support team can do performance reviews of your website and give you tips for improving performance.

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.

Return on Investment

We only have one Drupal website, so it just doesn't make sense for us to hire and train additional resources to manage the servers and Drupal code base.
It can be pricey for these types of services, but it is for the most part in-line with the industry.

Time to Market

I inherited a website already on the platform.

Scalability

There have been a couple of times where we needed to increase a cache size or add support for more users. These were easy to do.

Alternatives Considered

Pantheon and Platform.sh

We stay with Acquia because they offer managed updates to Drupal core. Not everyone does. And, they are experts in supporting Drupal. They can often get a little closer to the developer side of things than other companies. Prices and support are similar for similar services provided elsewhere.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Acquia Digital Experience Platform again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Acquia specializes in Drupal, so they are experts at maintaining the necessary infrastructure and code base for Drupal. They are a step above just a pure hosting company where you would be responsible for keeping the Drupal core up-to-date. Our IT team is relatively small and simply does not have the resources to stay on top of these updates as well as making sure the infrastructure is robust and "up".

Solid Platform

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Acquia Digital Experience Platform