Acquia Cloud

But What Is Acquia Cloud?

A short answer would be:

It's a platform where you can manage your Drupal apps throughout their lifecycles.

While a more detailed one would be:

It'a a cloud-based managed platform as a service that provides you with a whole suite of developer tools, easy-to-use workflows, integrations, API, monitoring and other powerful features, all optimized specifically for Drupal.

It's set up with Drupal top performance and scalability in mind, for highly available Drupal applications...
 

Why Acquia Cloud Over Other Hosting Solutions?

In other words, what are the major benefits of using the Acquia Cloud server over another provider or over a virtual private server?

Over hosting your own cloud?
 

1. It's designed, built and optimized for Drupal

Acquia Drupal is designed, tuned and continually improved by Drupal experts specifically for Drupal 8 websites and applications.

So, if you're looking for a cloud hosting platform that's:
 

• optimized to support the best practices for managing Drupal applications
• built for Drupal performance and scalability
• equipped with the right infrastructure to support all the specific processes — from development to staging — in your Drupal app's lifecycle
   

… then Acquia Cloud Drupal 8 is what you're looking for actually.

Would you go for an all-size-fits-all hosting solution or for one designed for Drupal from the ground up?
 

2. It's been engineered specifically for high-trafficked apps

Do you run thousands of company websites, each one with its own set of restrictions and requirements? Or is it particularly powerful Drupal apps that you're planning to run on your hosting platform?

Acquia Drupal is, again, your best option.

It's designed to withstand some of the most highly trafficked Drupal apps.

And it taps into an AWS infrastructure to ensure your applications are highly available.
 

3. It Enables You to Build Highly Scalable Apps Fast

You want them to be scalable. And you want them built fast, right?

Checked and... checked.

With Acquia Cloud you get the best:
 

• developer tools
• integrations
• workflows
• monitoring features
• APIs
   

… to develop and manage your Drupal applications at high speed.
 

4. It Backs Your App with Disaster Recovery Capabilities

A particularly important benefit if you have... particularly high availability requirements.
 

5. It Repairs Your Database If It Goes Unresponsive

When trouble strikes and your active database goes unresponsive, Acquia Cloud's designed to fix it for you.
 

6. You Can Choose a Geographic Region for Your App

Thanks to its underlying AWS infrastructure, Acquia's cloud hosting platform makes your app's available in all major geographical areas: Asia Pacific, US, EU, Canada, South America...

Just pick a location.
 

7. You Benefit from Additional Layers of Security

Secure and compliant. These are some of the key words to describe the Acquia Cloud hosting platform.

You get CDN, isolation, and multiple layers of security on top of all that.
 

8. Lower CDN Costs and Fully Custom Automated Deployment

Cost savings are always a major benefit...

Add serverless features, as well, to the budget-friendly CDN, and the automated deployment fine-tuned to your specific requirements.
 

9. It Handles All Balancer Failovers for You

Has your load balancer gone... unreachable? Rest assured: Acquia Cloud's designed to “intervene” and perform a balancer failover for you.
 

What Are Its Winning Features?

What are Acquia Cloud's competitive advantages? Well, all those powerful features that you get along with this platform, such as:
 

1. Multiple Environments to “Juggle” With

4 environments for developing and publishing your app, to be more specific: local, development, production, staging...

And that translates as 4 different instances for your databases and file directories, as well.
 

2. Load Balancing

What if one of your servers fails?

It's simple: your load balancer will then stop sending web requests.
 

3. 2 Different Models for Developing Your Applications

A local and a live development environment.

It's your choice how you write the code for your Drupal application: locally or an Acquia Cloud non-production environment.
 

4. Version Control

Let's say that you prefer developing your applications in a local environment.

You can then update your app on Acquia Cloud using the version control software that the platform provides you with.

It's flexible, it's efficient, and it's safe.

To Wrap Up, Use Acquia Cloud If…

• you want to gain more time to focus on what you do best: building and running great websites and applications
• you need a robust, full-featured hosting platform optimized specifically for Drupal