Over recent months, several clients have approached us to move them off Acquia’s hosting platform. We thought it might be helpful for other clients to hear more about the motivations behind this move, the alternatives we offer and how we approach hosting migrations.
What is Acquia?
Acquia is a fully managed hosting platform optimised for Drupal. It is a cloud-based system that is quick to set up and offers easy-to-use admin controls for site managers and maintainers. Acquia also provides additional features such as dev tools and enhanced security, making it an excellent option for Drupal sites.
The motivation for moving
The number one reason digital teams have given for moving away from Acquia is cost. Clients are finding that after initial quick set-up and low entry-level costs, Acquia's pricing model quickly becomes expensive for high-traffic sites and multiple development environments.
Acquia charges per environment and per request. This can be cheap for low-traffic sites, but costs ramp up quickly for larger and high-traffic sites and if you want to add additional sites or additional dev environments.
Cost savings
Each use case varies, but the primary savings come from consolidation opportunities. This can include combining multiple low-traffic sites onto fewer servers or reducing costs for clients with one popular site and multiple less popular sites.
One of our clients received a five-figure renewal quote from Aquia.
With our managed hosting, we got this down to a four-figure sum.
Here’s how this broke down.
| Server | Size | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Main site production server | Medium | £275 |
| Other production server | Medium | £275 |
| Stage server | Medium | £275 |
| Jenkins server | Small | £180 |
| Monthly total (excl. VAT) | £1,005 | |
| Estimated transition costs | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Quick site audit (assuming 6 codebases used by 7 sites) | 12 hrs | £120 | £1,440 |
| Server setup (2 hours per server) | 8 hrs | £120 | £960 |
| Jenkins setup | 4 hrs | £120 | £480 |
| Site migration (2 hour per site) | 14 hrs | £120 | £1,680 |
| Estimated total transition costs (excl. VAT) | £4,560 | ||
How we’ve helped our clients
Migration to new hosting involves replacing Acquia-specific modules and setting up a custom deployment solution using Jenkins. Careful planning and coordination are crucial for smooth transitions, especially for sites with user logins and integrations.
New Hosting Solution
We recommended Krystal's Katapult service for our managed hosting solutions. They offer:
- UK-based data centers (also US and Europe options)
- 100% renewable energy powered servers
- Excellent support
With our Terraform and Ansible scripting we can have a production ready server up and running in an hour.
Replacement for Acquia's Management Interface
We implement Jenkins as an open-source task runner to replace Acquia’s management interface. It's incredibly flexible and can be custom-configured for each client. Our standard setup offers:
- Deployment to different environments (dev, stage, production)
- Database syncing between environments
- Drush command execution
- Varnish cache clearing
- GitHub authentication for client access
Migration Process
We start the migration process with a site audit for Acquia-specific modules (e.g., Acquia Search, Acquia Purge). We then replace Acquia modules with generic alternatives, for example:
- Acquia Purge to Varnish Purge module
- Acquia Search to Search API Solr module
We set up new servers and test thoroughly. Checking and testing integrations (e.g., single sign-on, CRM connections) is particularly important.
Migration Best Practices
Other aspects that we cover during the migration process include:
- Ensure full access to DNS settings
- Set low DNS TTL for quicker transitions
- Implement content freezes during migration
- Coordinate with site users, especially for sites with logins or web forms
- Disable user logins and web form submissions during transition
- Have a rollback plan in case things don’t go as planned
Get in touch to find out if you could save money on hosting and learn more about how we can help you seamlessly transition to a new hosting platform.
