You know how when you're buying a car, and the questions just keep on coming? And the salesperson keeps making roundtrips to the manager's desk?
It's kind of like that when you're considering where to host your website. There's always time for more questions. It's one less surprise later on.
That's why I keep adding to my list.
It started, you may recall, with just five questions. A week later, I added five more. Now, before closing out this series, I've got a final four.
Ask now, avoid unpleasant surprises later. That's my motto, and it should be yours.
1. What is your level of Drupal expertise?
Acquia offers the industry's highest level of technical Drupal expertise. Our support organization is larger than most hosting companies––over 60 professionals worldwide with over 250 years of combined experience. And Acquia’s overall level of in-house Drupal expertise is unparalleled with over 150 Drupalists, including core committers, security team members, and module contributors. Furthermore, Acquia’s wealth of Drupal knowledge is being expanded continuously. Closed loop processes between our support and engineering organizations help to drive new tools and add to our Help Center, which we then share with the Drupal community.
2. If my site turns into a volcano of errors, will you proactively notify me?
Acquia monitors the health of customers’ servers, and we proactively notify customers of the nature of any issues we detect. When the problem is server-side, we mitigate it, and when the issue is caused by something on the application side, we provide recommended steps to resolve the issue (though we do not usually implement them ourselves unless the customer cannot for some reason).
Acquia also gives customers access to advanced monitoring at the application level, via partners like New Relic or features like our Uptime Monitoring tool—both of which can be used to alert customers in a self-service fashion whenever the application is suffering. If the root cause is server-related, we will notify the customer proactively, but some issues are application-only (meaning they do not trigger server health alerts on our end), so that is why we recommend that customers utilize application-level monitoring whenever possible.
3. Do you offer advanced platform analysis tools to help ensure that my application is running at its best?
Every Acquia Cloud Subscription comes with a suite of tools that make managing your Drupal sites easier than ever before. Drupal site developers, administrators, and site owners can quickly identify problems, eliminate costly mistakes, simplify processes, and improve overall site performance. Acquia’s monitoring tools analyze and measure the quality of your site based on security and performance parameters. Dozens of tests ensure your site’s conformance with best practices for security, performance, and general Drupal and web application development. Monitoring over 50 settings, these tools provide real-time analysis and proactive alerts for issues with your Drupal code and configuration. You can identify code issues and modifications fast, easily download patch files, and view needed updates at-a-glance. You’ll receive a site score to help you improve the quality of your site. You’ll get clear, actionable recommendations to help solve problems and expand your Drupal knowledge.
Acquia provides several additional tools that help you quickly troubleshoot problems with your application. The Uptime Monitoring tool monitors your site’s uptime and responsiveness. It checks your site every minute to see if it’s online and serving pages. For a developer looking to quickly and easily get visibility into a problem, log streaming is a solution that allows for easy access to information without having to download a full day’s log file. It provides real-time access to server logs from within the UI—making troubleshooting more efficient.
4. What is your uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA), and how do you ensure that you meet it?
Acquia commits to 99.95 percent platform, infrastructure, and application uptime. To ensure this, we operate monitoring services 24x7. Acquia uses the Nagios monitoring platform to provide instant access to over 50 vital real-time and historical metrics. We also maintain robust home-grown monitoring tools to ensure performance. Our team of Cloud Operations professionals is always standing by—proactively monitoring your environment and responding to critical issue alerts. With coverage in all time zones and fluency in five languages, the team is available 24x7 for critical, site-impacting issue response.
