Front End Hosting

Goal: confirm your subscription includes Front End Hosting – Advanced, and know what the platform runs before your first deploy.

What you’ll have when you’re done

• Your entitlement confirmed, and the request to send if it is missing.
• What the platform runs: any Node.js production server, with the versions and mechanics your app must match.

Prerequisites

• An Acquia Cloud Platform subscription (with Owner or Administrator permission if you want to check the entitlements yourself)
• A frontend app you intend to deploy (for example the one from First fetch)

Steps

1. Know what the platform runs.

   Front End Hosting – Advanced runs your app as a Node.js production server on Cloud Next:

   • Any Node.js production server. SSR and ISR via Next.js are fully supported, and so is any other framework or plain Node server that listens on the injected port; the deploy contract is framework-agnostic.
   • Node.js 22 and 24 (verified against a live environment’s runtime list).
   • Prebuilt artifacts. The platform runs npm start on what you push; it does not build your app. Deploys come from your own CI/CD or Code Studio, equal alternatives, and the Cloud Platform user interface can deploy a pushed ref directly.
   • Autoscaling (at least two replicas per environment, up to 16 in production) and CDN integration.

2. Check what your subscription includes.

   Front End Hosting – Advanced is a paid add-on entitlement to a Cloud Platform subscription, not a default. acli api:subscriptions:list prints the subscriptions your account can see, and acli api:subscriptions:entitlements-list <subscription-uuid> prints one subscription’s entitlements; a Front End Hosting entitlement is what you are looking for. The Cloud UI lists the same entitlements for an Owner or Administrator; see Managing subscriptions on docs.acquia.com.

3. If it is missing, ask your account manager to add it.

   Ask your Acquia account manager to add the entitlement to the subscription; you cannot enable it yourself from the Cloud Platform user interface. If you do not have their contact details, contact Acquia Support with the request instead. If your frontend is fully static (prebuilt HTML with no server at request time), say so in the request: a static-only tier exists, and your account manager can set up whichever fits.

   Provisioning happens automatically when the contract is signed, and the application arrives ready in the Cloud Platform user interface with its environments already created (a verified new application came with Prod and Staging, Node.js 22 preselected). If yours has not appeared, file a support ticket.

When something goes wrong

No Front End Hosting product appears under Subscription Entitlements

your subscription doesn’t include it yet; it is an add-on, not a default. Ask your Acquia account manager to add it, or contact Acquia Support.

Next steps

• Deploy your frontend: ship the golden-path app to Front End Hosting – Advanced from your own CI.
• Deploy a Canvas Headless app: the per-framework artifact shapes for the Canvas Headless templates.
• Deploying a headless frontend: production environment variables, ISR mechanics, and platform constraints.