
A Need For Drupal Hosting
Formerly known as Acquia Fields when it was in development, Acquia Hosting was announced as officially available at DrupalCon.
According to Dries Buytaert, there was a "market need for specialized Drupal hosting". Designed for medium to large size organizations it is not your generic hosting platform.
- Designed for Drupal: The infrastructure was designed with Drupal in mind. Buytaert says it has been tuned and optimized for Drupal, its deployment tools for Drupal development.
- Full Drupal Support: Support for your website, for your Drupal application and for the infrastructure it all sits on.
Highly Available and Developer Supported
The actual infrastructure is provided by Amazon AWS and server clusters are load balanced using Nginx. Two databases contain your content in a master-master configuration.
If you need your own dedicated environment, Acquia will support you. For many though, sharing a hosting service is satisfactory and probably a lot cheaper. Acquia Hosting provides both.
Learning Opportunities
As you continue to develop your Drupal solution, Acquia provides hosted SVN repositories for code management, staging environment when you need them for testing and automated deployment.
Do You Qualify for Free Hosting?
Hosting prices are based on bandwidth, storage and functional needs. Are you a not-for-profit that supports the Drupal community? You may qualify for free Acquia Hosting.
You can get more details on this new hosting service on the Acquia website.