drupal hosting

Most weeks I am consulting with large clients ready to host or tune Drupal. Many of these clients are large Java/Oracle shops, some are non-tech companies just looking to build internal knowledge, and still others love open source and are simply new to PHP/MySQL applications. In any of these cases, they're often familiar (maybe in name alone) with most of the Drupal infrastructure buzzwords - Varnish, Memcached, Redis, APC, XHProf, etc.

As I discussed in my previous screencast, Drupal site building workflow involves a separate development, staging, and production environment. The different environments use different databases, generally on different database servers since you do not want your testing activities to impact your production site. Traditionally this means you need to juggle multiple Drupal settings.php files containing your database credentials and manually configure database replication and failover yourself.

Acquia Hosting just got faster for our European users! Our customers asked for it and we can now deploy our high-availability, Drupal-tuned hosting stack in the EU. A closer web server means faster, more responsive web site.

Acquia's new EU data center markedly improves performance for European users. Compared to hosting in our US data center, we've measured network performance that's consistently three times faster with roundtrip times improving from over 100ms to 30-40ms. In the UK, they're even faster -- a 20ms roundtrip!