Acquia provides Drupal hosting and management services. Customer case studies show how Acquia hosting improved performance, scalability, flexibility and support for several organizations. ForeignPolicy.com saw better performance and scaling. A global PR firm was able to scale to 20 million visitors. MotherJones.com gained flexibility. And the New York State Senate benefited from Acquia's reliable infrastructure and enterprise-class support.

1. Drupal Site Hosting and Management:
Acquia Customer Stories
Bryan House Jim Salem
Sr. Director, Marketing VP, Platform Services
Acquia Acquia
@bryanhouse @jcsalem

2. Upcoming Webinars
Thursday June 10th
– Views Askew: Using the Many Forms of Drupal Views
Thursday June 17th
- 90 Minute Introduction to the Fusion Theming
Framework for Drupal
Register Today - http://acquia.com/webinars

3. Agenda
Overview Acquia Hosting
Customer case studies
– Performance
– Scalability
– Flexibility
– Support
Summary
Q&A

4. Drupal Optimized Cloud-based Hosting

5. Scalable, High Performance Infrastructure
balancer balancer file
Hosted on AWS, SAS 70 page caching page caching server
certified platform
Highly available
HA file server
Caching & load balancing web web
via Varnish, Nginx node web
node
node
Opcode caching file
server
Fault-tolerant HA file system
synchronous db failover
Nightly offsite backups
4 hour snapshots active passive
db db

6. How is Acquia Hosting Unique?
Highly-available, elastic architecture
Optimized for Drupal scalability & performance
One-stop shop - “No finger-pointing”
World class Drupal and systems expertise

7. Who’s Using Acquia Hosting?
Global PR Firm
Performance Scalability
Flexibility Support

8. ForeignPolicy.com - Performance

9. Background: ForeignPolicy.com
Award-winning magazine for global politics,
economics and ideas
Foreign Policy’s website goal – extend
magazine’s reach
Why Drupal?
– “We needed something that would meet our growing
needs… something scalable and flexible”

10. ForeignPolicy.com Challenges
To start – they hosted their site internally
Struggled with success
– Rapid content growth
– Social features to share content
– Infrastructure limitations impacted site performance

11. ForeignPolicy.com Challenges
We “weren’t prepared for how quickly the site
would grow thanks to the new content and easier
ways of sharing it”
“Things were rough for a while. There just wasn’t
the hardware and infrastructure … to ramp up
growth so quickly”

12. Intelligent Page Caching

13. ForeignPolicy.com and Acquia
“Acquia is the one-stop solution for us”
Benefits
– Better site performance & scaling
“We don’t have to worry about the site crashing in case one of
our articles attracts attention”
– 24x7 Support
“If something does go wrong, Acquia responds quickly and
doesn’t stop until they find the source of the problem.”
– Technical access to site
“It was key for us that Acquia provide the support… but that
we still have full access to work with our environment.”

14. Global PR Firm - Scalability
Global PR Firm

15. A Global PR Firm
Major business news announcement
– Expected 20 million unique visitors the first day
– Major business implication should the site fail
Why Drupal?
– Drupal enabled them to quickly make site changes
during the day of the announcement
Critical success factor
– Budgeted time for load testing from the start

16. What is Load Testing?
An industry best practice to insure performance
Load testing cloud services
– Soasta CloudTest
– BrowsterMob
DIY load testing
– Jmeter
– Siege
– The Grinder
– Goofy (an Acquia-developed open source tool)

17. Problems at their previous ISP
Originally, Global PR Firm chose a traditional,
well-known hosting provider
Problems
– No Drupal expertise
– Hosting firm couldn’t provide a cost-effective hosting
environment that scaled to PR firm’s needs
Failed PR Firm’s load testing
So…
– One week before launch they called Acquia

18. Scalable, Elastic Architecture

19. Global PR Firm Results
Rigorous load testing prior to the big day
– Tested Acquia Hosting using Soasta CloudTest
5,000 requests/second!
320 mbits/sec traffic
830 page views/sec
– Found hardware configuration best suited to needs
Successful site launch, no hiccups
– “best web launch … ever”
After the storm…
– Acquia scaled down hardware configuration to meet
steady-state traffic conditions, saving them $$$

20. MotherJones.com - Flexibility

21. Mother Jones
Non-profit news organization that specializes in
investigative, political & social justice reporting
– Launched web site in 1993
Why Drupal?
– Flexibility of Drupal platform
– Ability to add new functionality quickly - modular
architecture

22. Previous Hosting Challenges
Mother Jones faced a series of challenges with
their first hosting provider
– Uptime
– Performance
– Spambots
– Log access

23. Proactive Monitoring, High Availability

24. Mother Jones and Acquia
Why Acquia?
– One stop shop for entire Drupal infrastructure
– Hosting, support, and remote administration
Improved site performance
– Drupal site optimization
– More aggressive page caching
Faster support issue resolution
– Reduced site downtime

25. Mother Jones and Acquia
“Our initial team simply weren’t experienced at
preparing an iron-clad architecture that could
withstand traffic intensive demands. Acquia is clearly
experienced, and has specific strategies, testing
procedures, and monitoring tools to ensure we can
handle traffic loads today, tomorrow, and next
year.”
“Acquia has demonstrated superior expertise in a
very simple way – they excel at discovering and
solving problems immediately.”
Robert Wise, System Administrator, MotherJones.com

26. New York State Senate - Support

27. New York State Senate
Previous sites
– Static, brochure-ware
– No standardization across senators, sites all different
– Little discourse, less value to citizens
Ground-breaking Gov 2.0 web strategy
– “We are regarded as having one of the best legislative sites
in the country.”
– Creative Commons to keep all information open and free
Why Drupal?
– Repeatable framework for senator microsite deployment
– Content sharing & reuse across sites
– Robust permissions and access controls

28. New York State Senate and Acquia
Primary drivers for Acquia selection
– Reliability of hosting infrastructure
– Availability of enterprise-class support
Results
– Improved content access, all Senate administrative
and legislative data available online
– Increased citizen participation

29. New York State Senate and Acquia
“Acquia offers a quality of support that I haven’t
seen before in the Drupal community. They are
responsive and proactive. They aren’t content
just to see the site running smoothly-- Acquia is
always looking for new modules and features that
can help us better realize our vision for our site.”
Andrew Hoppin, CIO, NYSenate.gov

30. Many Reasons to Choose Acquia Hosting
Global PR Firm
Performance Scalability
Flexibility Support

31. one-stop shop
Drupal application + infrastructure support

32. Benefits of Acquia Hosting
Highly-available, elastic architecture
Optimized for Drupal scalability & performance
One-stop shop - “No finger-pointing”
World class Drupal and systems expertise

33. Do you love working with Drupal?
If so, Acquia is hiring:
– Engineering & design
– Operations
– Client advisors and consulting
– Inside sales
Check out openings at
http://acquia.com/careers

34. Questions
For more information, visit:
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– http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-hosting
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– 888.9.ACQUIA recorded_webinars
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