The 5 Essential Abilities for Digital Applications

Where to host your website...

It's not an easy decision. Last week, I suggested five questions to get you started on the selection process.

This week: five more questions, which will help you focus on what's important.

Remember, this is not a snap decision. It's a process. I may even float a few final queries next week.

1. Will you help me debug my code?

If your site is slow or modules aren’t working, Acquia will help you. We don’t just send you a link to a tutorial; we will help you solve your application issues. Many hosting providers do not provide Drupal support; they do not look into issues specific to your site and custom code. Acquia offers end-to-end support for Drupal core, contributed modules and themes, custom modules and themes, and third-party integration modules. Acquia can diagnose issues regardless of origin––whether they are at the infrastructure layer, platform layer, or application layer. We uniquely do root cause analysis (both diagnosis and correction). With our insight into common (and uncommon) problems, we are able to routinely prevent these problems before they occur. You no longer have to take primary responsibility for your site's health.

2. Will you advise me on my site’s architecture?

Every Acquia Subscription comes with some number of Advisory Hours—one-on-one best practice consultations with our Support personnel on any topic of your choice. Advisory Hours are a unique offering, featuring one-hour discussion sessions customized to your needs. Ask workflow and development questions and learn implementation and configuration best practices. Examples of discussion topics include caching strategies, redirect implementations for mobile, migration tactics, and new feature builds.

3. Do you offer just hosting, or more?

Pure hosting companies just offer commodity hosting: your sites live on their infrastructure and they provide you with support for that infrastructure. What Acquia offers is far beyond hosting––or even support. We offer a strategic partnership designed with one central tenet in mind: we will not let you fail. The success of your sites and your business requires a complete, holistic approach to sustained application quality and resiliency. This focus on application quality encompasses code, configuration, security, and performance. The Acquia Cloud platform is Drupal-tuned to automate quality assurance and support continuous delivery. Application lifecycle management tools ensure that you have visibility into the health and uptime of your infrastructure, platform, and applications. Our Operations team is always standing by––proactively monitoring your environment and receiving critical issue alerts. Our enterprise-class, “follow-the-sun” support for both infrastructure and Drupal sites offers an added safety net to ensure reliability. This end-to-end total application assurance, combined with the industry’s highest level of Drupal expertise, is what sets us––and consequently, your business––apart.

4. Is your hosting service “enterprise-ready?”

Not all hosting providers are enterprise-ready, but Acquia is. Acquia Cloud’s robust set of features is designed with enterprises in mind and uniquely includes: teams and permissions, two-factor authentication, IP address access control, geo choice, multi-region replication and failover, VPN, usage analytics, custom scripts, interactive SSH, and more. Our always-on support for both infrastructure and Drupal sites is unmatched by any other Drupal cloud provider, and the breadth of our Support offerings shows that we are tailored to meet your every need. Among our competitors, we offer the highest level of security and compliance. And our offerings go beyond our Drupal-tuned cloud platform; our value-added Engagement Services like Search, Mollom, and Lift enhance the user experience of your Drupal site.

5. Do you offer round-the-clock, 24x7 support?

Many hosting providers only offer support during business hours (9am-5pm). If the vendor is on the West Coast, and you’re on the East Coast, that’s at least three lost hours for you. Acquia offers 24x7 live support for critical issues with as little as 30-minute response time for some subscription tiers. The team has coverage in all time zones with fluency in more than five languages. With our enterprise, always-on, “follow-the-sun” approach, we simply won’t let you fail.