FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Sites Add-ons Teams Subscriptions Help Sign in Acquia Cloud Free How can I get started with my Acquia Cloud Free subscription? What's the difference between Acquia Cloud Free and a paid Acquia Cloud subscription? How can I upgrade to a paid subscription? How can I export my site from Acquia Cloud Free? How big can my Acquia Cloud Free website be? How can I get support for Acquia Cloud Free? What alerts and monitoring do I get with Acquia Cloud Free? Caching How does caching work on Acquia Cloud? Cloud What happened to Dev Cloud and Managed Cloud? Continuous integration How can I export my website and data from Acquia Cloud? Customization Can my Acquia Cloud site detect mobile devices? Does Acquia Cloud support IPv6 addresses? Database How many databases can my Acquia Cloud site have? Infrastructure Where are the servers located? Can I move my servers to a different geographic region? How does Acquia Cloud balance loads between servers? How does my web site get backed up? Where is Memcached installed? What tools are available to analyze and optimize website performance? Operations What do I need to know to use Acquia Cloud? Performance What is the best way to serve pages with fast response times across the globe? How many files can I maintain in my files directory? Can I customize my Varnish cache? How can I perform load testing? Security How does Acquia Cloud handle security upgrades and other patches? How does Acquia monitor websites on Acquia Cloud? How does Acquia Cloud handle intrusion detection? Does Acquia Cloud have a web application firewall? Software What Drupal distributions can I use? Can I use a customized OS image or database version? Can I install other software on Acquia Cloud? Support What is the Acquia Help Center? How do I file a Support ticket? What will happen to my current tickets? What if I do not have a link to my existing ticket? What if I cannot locate one of my older tickets? Why can`t my colleague or collaborator view my tickets? I have a closed ticket I want to reopen. Will I still be able to access older tickets that have already been closed? What does the status of my ticket (New, In Progress, Solved, Closed, Your response needed) mean? I need a new subscription created. The Acquia Help Center requires me to choose a subscription when filing a ticket. What should I do? I have more questions. What should I do? How can I provide feedback about the new Acquia Help Center? Version control What version control systems can I use with Acquia Cloud? Can I use GitHub with Acquia Cloud? Workflow Can I write to the file system using Drush? Acquia Cloud Free How can I get started with my Acquia Cloud Free subscription? To get started with Acquia Cloud Free, read the Getting Started guide, then explore the other information in the Acquia Cloud documentation and the Acquia Library. Acquia Cloud Free is built on the same infrastructure as Acquia Cloud, so you can use the Acquia Cloud documentation to learn how to use it. As a general rule, you can use Acquia Cloud Free to do anything you could do on Acquia Cloud, subject to the limitations listed on Acquia Cloud Free subscriptions. What's the difference between Acquia Cloud Free and a paid Acquia Cloud subscription? Acquia Cloud Free is built on the same infrastructure as Acquia Cloud. With a few exceptions, you can use Acquia Cloud Free to do anything you could do on Acquia Cloud. The key differences are: Acquia Cloud Free is intended for development, evaluation, and testing, not for production deployment. Smaller server size and disk storage limited to 500 MB for each of code, database, and uploaded files. No custom domain names. Support is available through the Acquia Forums only. For a more complete comparison, see Acquia Cloud Free subscriptions. How can I upgrade to a paid subscription? You can upgrade your Acquia Cloud Free subscription to a paid Acquia Cloud subscription at any time. Click one of the Upgrade buttons in the Cloud user interface (for example, there's one on the Cloud > Workflow page under Prod), or go directly to the Cloud pricing page to select your new hardware and other Acquia Cloud and Acquia Network features. How can I export my site from Acquia Cloud Free? Acquia Cloud makes daily backups of your website's database, which you can download at any time using the Cloud > Backups page. In addition, you can make additional backups any time you want using the Cloud > Databases page. Note that these backups count against your disk quota. Read more about backing up your site. In addition, you can use the Drush command line tool to create a backup of your complete website at any time. Learn more. You can use these backups to run your website locally, or export your site to a different hosting provider. How big can my Acquia Cloud Free website be? An Acquia Cloud Free website is limited in size by the amount of disk space that Acquia makes available. Your website's codebase, database, and file system are each limited to 500 MB of disk storage. See Managing disk storage for Acquia Cloud free subscriptions for information about how to work within the storage limit. How can I get support for Acquia Cloud Free? As a free offering, Acquia Cloud Free does not entitle you to live or ticketed support. This is the case even if you also have a paid Acquia Cloud subscription. If you need help with your Acquia Cloud Free subscription, read the documentation or post a question in the Acquia Cloud Forum. What alerts and monitoring do I get with Acquia Cloud Free? With an Acquia Cloud Free subscription, you get some, but not all, of the features you get with a paid Acquia Network and Acquia Cloud subscription. You get a starter set of Insight alerts. You can upgrade to a paid subscription to get rich analysis, metrics, and monitoring tools, including server metrics, static code analysis, uptime monitoring, and the full suite of Insight security, performance, and best practices alerts. For more information about Acquia Insight, see Getting started with Insight. Caching How does caching work on Acquia Cloud? Drupal supports a wide variety of caches both at the system level and at the application level, which allows for fine grained control of caching. The system caches include Varnish (a caching HTTP reverse proxy), APC (a PHP opcode cache), Memcached (an in-memory caching system), and MySQL caches. The Acquia Cloud UI enables clearing the Varnish cache. You can also use the Purge module for page cache clearing with Varnish. APC and Memcache monitoring can be done with application modules like the Performance stats module. At the application level, Drupal supports a wide array of caches, including page, block, views, panels, entity, and field caches, each of which have specific UIs for configuration as well as rules-based management of caches. While this is far from a centralized UI for all caches, it does allow a fine grain of control. For more information, see Caching. Cloud What happened to Dev Cloud and Managed Cloud? Acquia Cloud used to consist of two products named Dev Cloud and Managed Cloud. We've changed their names to help you think of them as two service levels of the same product, rather than separate products. Managed Cloud is now called Acquia Cloud Enterprise and Dev Cloud is now called Acquia Cloud. Acquia Cloud provides a self-service environment built for developing and deploying one or more production websites. Acquia Cloud Enterprise delivers a fully-managed, scalable, multi-server service, with high availability. For more information, see Acquia Cloud and Comparing Acquia Cloud standard and Acquia Cloud Enterprise. Continuous integration How can I export my website and data from Acquia Cloud? Acquia Cloud provides a number of options for exporting your site. You can use the Cloud UI, drush commands, or directly through the file system, which you have access to through SSH. Using the Cloud > Backup page, you can create and download backups on demand, or download automatic backups that Acquia Cloud creates every 24 hours. Using Drush, you can create a site archive, which you can access over scp or SSH. Drush also has Acquia Cloud-specific APIs for triggering backups and exports. You can also use drush sql-dump to create a MySQL dump of your site's database. You can use rsync via SSH access to copy files to a remote location. If you need access to part of your data, you can use Drupal application modules such as Views or Backup and Migrate to select a subset of data. Customization Can my Acquia Cloud site detect mobile devices? If you are an Acquia Cloud Enterprise customer and you have a mobile website, you can configure your site so that requests from mobile devices are redirected to the mobile site. When mobile redirects are enabled for your site, requests with user-agent headers that are identified as mobile devices are redirected to a mobile domain. For example, requests for www.example.com or example.com are redirected to m.example.com. For more information, see Enabling mobile redirects. For general information about mobile strategies, see the Acquia Library. Does Acquia Cloud support IPv6 addresses? Yes, Acquia Cloud supports IPv6 IP addresses. Since IPv6 support on Acquia Cloud requires an Amazon Web Services Elastic Load Balancer instance (ELB), there is an additional charge, unless you are an Acquia Cloud Enterprise customer. For detailed information, see Using IPv6 IP addresses. Database How many databases can my Acquia Cloud site have? The Acquia Cloud platform is optimized to run many Drupal installations, each with its own unique databases. Using the Cloud > Databases page, you can add databases to your site. However, running a large number of databases on the same site can adversely affect the performance of the database servers and the usability of the Acquia Network user interface. Consequently: Acquia Cloud limits you from running more than 100 databases per subscription. If you add more than 30 databases, you are likely to experience slower page loads and responsiveness in the Acquia Network user interface. If you believe you need a larger number of distinct databases, you should split your sites to run on multiple clusters. If you have any questions about your current database usage or the limits on your account, please contact Acquia Support. Infrastructure Where are the servers located? When you set up your Acquia Cloud subscription, you can choose USA, Europe, or Australia for the location of your servers. Acquia Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In order to maintain a high level of security, not all specific details about network topology, physical locations, and AWS specific security procedures are available to the public. For more information, see How Acquia Cloud works and Acquia Cloud security and architecture. For more information about the features, security, and accreditation of Amazon Web Services, see AWS Security and Compliance Center from Amazon Web Services. Can I move my servers to a different geographic region? When you first create an Acquia Cloud subscription, you can select either USA, Europe, or Australia for the location of your servers. You cannot directly move your website to a different geographic region after you create it. Instead, you can create a new subscription in the region you want, export your website from Acquia Cloud, and then import it into the new subscription. How does Acquia Cloud balance loads between servers? Acquia Cloud uses nginx for HTTP and HTTPS load balancing. When the load balancer detects a web server failure, it will no longer send web requests to the failed server. To guard against load balancer failures, Acquia uses a redundant load balancer configuration, with an active load balancer backed up by a passive load balancer. If the active load balancer fails, the passive load balancer is available to take over. Acquia's operational infrastructure constantly monitors over dozen system parameters on all load balancers. In addition, it monitors that the web sites behind those balancers to ensure they are accessible, reliable and reachable. When the monitoring detects an error, it immediately alerts our 24x7 operations staff. The operator then determines whether the failure is due to high traffic, denial-of-service attack, or hardware failure. Depending on the type of failure, the passive balancer is brought online within seconds. How does my web site get backed up? Drupal sites are a combination of code, databases and files. Your web site's code is stored in a version control system (Git or SVN) and is backed up to Amazon Web Services. Acquia Cloud makes daily backups of all databases in all environments and keeps them for 3 days. You can download them at any time. In addition, you can make on-demand backups of any database at any time on the Workflow page of your Acquia Cloud account at Cloud > Workflow. Acquia Cloud keeps your on-demand backups until you delete them. You can also create on-demand or automated backups of your environment using drush to create a Drupal site archive of your code, databases, and files. In addition, Acquia Cloud takes internal disaster recovery snapshots of all data every hour and retains them on a diminishing schedule for 3 months. In the very unlikely event of a total data center loss or the loss of multiple disk systems, Acquia Cloud could use these disaster recovery snapshots to restore your sites to another location. Acquia Cloud does not provide customer access to these disaster recovery snapshots and will not use them to restore sites due to data-loss or deletion by customers. For more information, see Backing up your site. Where is Memcached installed? Acquia Cloud can run Memcached on any web server you configure it on. As an option, Acquia Cloud Enterprise customers can purchase a dedicated Memcached server. What tools are available to analyze and optimize website performance? Acquia Cloud includes tools you can use to analyze your website's performance and capacity. This helps you manage scale and optimize performance. Among the tools included in Acquia Cloud are: Acquia Insight server statistics XHProf slow query logs Percona Toolkit and Maatkit database analysis tools In addition, Acquia Network provides access to an extensive set of third-party tools for profiling, monitoring, or testing your website: New Relic TraceView Yottaa Blitz.io Blazemeter Chartbeat Operations What do I need to know to use Acquia Cloud? You need a general understanding of web concepts, as well as either Drupal familiarity (if you want to create a new Drupal-based website) or an existing Drupal website for import into Acquia Cloud. Unless your site is on Acquia Cloud Enterprise, you are responsible for managing your site, while Acquia manages your servers. You should be able to perform basic debugging tasks like: Looking at the Apache error logs to review PHP errors. Looking at the Workflow task log to see if tasks such as Acquia Network imports are posting error messages. Using the command line to run basic drush commands (such as drush status) to get error messages for debugging sites that may be offline. We also recommend that you be familiar with version control software and its concepts, particularly Git or Subversion (SVN). As you develop your website locally, you can send files and changes to your website’s code on Acquia Cloud using version control software, instead of copying the files directly using file upload tools, like FTP or SFTP. For more information about the processes and skills required when creating a new website on Acquia Cloud or importing an existing website, examine the Getting Started with Acquia Cloud guide. Performance What is the best way to serve pages with fast response times across the globe? If your website is accessed by a global audience, you can integrate your Acquia Cloud website with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to achieve the fastest response times. Drupal can integrate with origin-pull as well as push CDNs. Acquia customers integrate with Akamai, Level 3, AWS CloudFront, Limelight, AT&T, Edgecast and others. A tool like Yottaa, which is available as an add-on service through the Acquia Network, can also help analyze page speed and improve performance with any CDN provider. Yottaa monitors performance from different data centers around the world and provides an optimizer that integrates with CDNs to help address front-end performance. How many files can I maintain in my files directory? In Acquia Cloud, uploaded files are separate from the Drupal database and your code repository. Acquia Cloud deployment code creates a symbolic link to your website's /files directory. For more information, see About files. If you maintain a very large number of files on your website, it can have a substantial negative effect on performance and stability, especially if they are all contained in the same directory. We have found that over 2500 files in any single directory in the files structure can seriously impact your server's performance and potentially its stability. If your site requires a large number of files, maintain them in multiple directories. If your site requires a greater number of files and you are concerned about performance, we will be glad to work with you to use CDNs or other best practices that can act to mitigate this risk. There is some variability to these thresholds, as larger servers may have more resources available to handle the files and thus can reduce the impact. Your Development and Staging environments may be more vulnerable to this issue, since they most commonly share resources. For more information, see Optimizing file paths: Organizing files in subfolders and Improving website performance. Can I customize my Varnish cache? You cannot configure Varnish yourself. Acquia has configured the shared Varnish installation in a way we believe is optimal for most websites. If you are an Acquia Cloud Enterprise customer, and you have dedicated load balancers, custom Varnish configuration may be available through an Acquia Professional Services engagement. Contact your Acquia account manager for more information. If you are not an Acquia Cloud Enterprise customer, you cannot customize your Varnish cache. How can I perform load testing? Acquia controls load testing in order to avoid any inadvertent performance issues. No shared resources, especially load balancers, can be used for load testing. For details about Acquia's policies, see Preparing for security and penetration testing. Security How does Acquia Cloud handle security upgrades and other patches? Acquia Cloud meets some of the highest industry security standards, such as US federal government civilian FISMA and and military DIACAP security standards. We have rigorous documentation and policy processes. Changes to the environment have to be documented and reviewed and signed off by a senior engineer. Acquia's security team closely monitors its installed operating systems and other software for security updates. We normally respond to security updates within this schedule: Critical: 1 day Severe: 1 week Moderate: 30 days For more information, see Acquia Cloud security and architecture and Compliance with standards and regulations. How does Acquia monitor websites on Acquia Cloud? Acquia uses the Nagios monitoring platform to provide instant access to vital real time and historical metrics of the servers we provision in the AWS infrastructure which make up the sites which we manage for our customers. We monitor over 40 metrics, which are linked to alerts sent to the Acquia operations team via email, SMS, and pager. Metrics include but are not limited to disk utilization, CPU utilization, memory usage and swap activity, processes running, database size and storage space available, as well as many Drupal-specific metrics important to monitor. Acquia's monitoring systems implement automated alerting and escalation to ensure that our operations team is notified when alerts are generated. How does Acquia Cloud handle intrusion detection? Acquia Cloud is protected by the Amazon Web Services network intrusion detection system. In addition, Acquia uses OSSEC, an open source host-based Intrusion Detection System. OSSEC performs real-time alerting and active response. Its main use is to detect brute force log in attempts and alert our Operations and Security teams. In addition, we use Puppet to control configuration changes. For an in-depth look at security and Acquia Cloud, read Acquia Cloud security and architecture. Does Acquia Cloud have a web application firewall? No. Generally, a web application firewall (WAF) is designed to protect a site against known vulnerabilities by preventing the type of traffic which would exploit vulnerabilities. We believe it is preferable to eliminate vulnerabilities through use of Drupal, secure coding, and validation that vulnerabilities do not exist through security testing. Acquia partners with Akamai. Customers who want to use a WAF can use Akamai's WAF platform to protect their sites. Akamai's WAF technology prevents the attack traffic from ever reaching the web site over the Internet. For more information, see Acquia Cloud security and architecture. Software What Drupal distributions can I use? You can easily install many popular Drupal distributions, using the Install Drupal option on the Cloud > Workflow page. The following Drupal distributions are available: Acquia Drupal 6 Acquia Drupal 7 Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) Drupal 6 core Drupal 7 core Drupal Commons 3 Open Atrium OpenPublish OpenScholar Pressflow 6 For more information, see Installing a Drupal distribution. You are not limited to these Drupal distributions, however. You can install any other Drupal distribution you like (as long as it is Drupal 5 or later). To install a different Drupal distribution: Download the Drupal distribution. The standard Drupal distribution format is the same as the Drush site archive format. On the Cloud > Workflow page, click Import existing site. Click Upload a Drush site archive. Click Choose file, and select the Drupal distribution file from the location where you saved the downloaded file. Click Import. Can I use a customized OS image or database version? No. Acquia Cloud is a full platform with advanced provisioning, monitoring, and recovery features. We perform extensive testing and monitoring on our platform instances to ensure reliabiilty. This would not be possible if we didn't have control over the underlying operating system and other key platform software. Can I install other software on Acquia Cloud? Acquia Cloud only runs Drupal, PHP, and select services such as email and MySQL. While you can install any PHP software, you cannot install Java or daemons. For more information, see Acquia Cloud technology platform and supported software A current list of the PHP extensions running on a Drupal 7 site can be found at the http://[site_URL]/admin/reports/status/php page of the site. You can also see this information by logging in to the Acquia Network and opening Insight > Servers. If you need additional PHP extensions for your Drupal site, please contact Acquia Support at https://network.acquia.com/network/dashboard/tickets . We have added many extensions based on popular requests and we may be able to add it to an upcoming release of Acquia Cloud. Support What is the Acquia Help Center? The Acquia Help Center allows staff and customers to track support incidents and provides additional resources for Acquia products. This includes: Streamlined ticket submission and tracking More powerful options for sorting and filtering your tickets Easier contact management A new user interface showing related documentation and resources And it's all built in Drupal! The first phase of the new Acquia Help Center was rolled out on Thursday, 13 February 2014. We've created a brief walk-through video of the Acquia Help Center to help you familiarize yourself with the new and improved features. How do I file a Support ticket? Sign in to Acquia and click on the Help tab located at the top. Then, click Create ticket. For more information, see How to create a ticket. What will happen to my current tickets? Previously-filed tickets have been migrated to the new ticket system. This includes tickets currently in progress. Existing tickets have been assigned new numbers. Any ticket links you may have had prior to 13 February will be redirected to the ticket’s URL in the new system. What if I do not have a link to my existing ticket? You can filter and sort your tickets by subscription, status, urgency, and date. You can also search by full text search in all the fields of the tickets. Only have a six-digit ticket number, for example #123456? You can find it using the following URL pattern: https://insight.acquia.com/support/tickets?ticketNum=123456. That URL will redirect to the ticket's URL in the new system. What if I cannot locate one of my older tickets? File a new ticket to contact Support. Provide any information you have on the missing ticket (old ticket number, person who filed the ticket, subject matter) in the new ticket. We will be happy to assist you in locating the missing ticket and ensuring you can access it. Why can`t my colleague or collaborator view my tickets? Only individuals listed as contacts on the applicable subscription will be able to see your tickets. Please note that only those who are added as contacts to your subscription will be able to see and access tickets. These are also the only individuals who will receive updates of the tickets. You can no longer cc individuals on tickets unless they are listed in the Contacts section of the applicable subscription. If the person who filed the original ticket files an issue against a Closed ticket, they can choose to open a Follow-Up ticket. This will be visible to the contacts listed on the applicable subscription. If you are using the Teams and Permissions feature, there are permissions that enable team members to create and work with support tickets. By default, these permissions are enabled for all three default roles. I have a closed ticket I want to reopen. Will I still be able to access older tickets that have already been closed? Due to limitations in the previous ticketing system, in many cases tickets closed prior to 13 February 2014 will initially be visible only to the person who filed them. They may not be available to everyone on your team. If you would like to reopen a Closed ticket, you can select the Follow-Up option on the original ticket to open a new ticket for a related issue. What does the status of my ticket (New, In Progress, Solved, Closed, Your response needed) mean? When you file a ticket to request assistance from Acquia Support, a Customer Support Engineer is assigned to investigate and address your questions in the ticket. Tickets awaiting a response from a Support Engineer are marked with the status New. As Acquia Support investigates your technical challenges, the ticket status will change to In Progress. If additional information is needed from you, the ticket status will be changed to Your response needed. When a solution is provided, the ticket status will change to Solved. Replying to a Solved ticket changes the ticket status to In Progress until a further solution is reached, at which time the ticket will be marked as Solved again. After 21 days of inactivity, the ticket will be Closed. If you need to discuss it further, you can file a follow-up ticket against the original ticket. I need a new subscription created. The Acquia Help Center requires me to choose a subscription when filing a ticket. What should I do? When you file your ticket, please choose an existing subscription with the same contacts as the ones you'd like to have on your new subscription. This will allow us to make sure the appropriate contacts are added to your new subscription. I have more questions. What should I do? If you have a question we have not addressed, please file a ticket with Acquia Support. How can I provide feedback about the new Acquia Help Center? Please fill out the Help Center feedback form to let us know what you think. Or, if you'd like to participate in user experience research, please email us at uxresearch@acquia. We're happy to consider you for research! We will use your customer feedback to improve the design of the ticketing system to better suit your needs. Version control What version control systems can I use with Acquia Cloud? Acquia Cloud provides a choice of two integrated version control systems, Git or Subversion (SVN). You can use other version control systems in your local environment, but must use either Git or SVN once you have pushed your code to Acquia Cloud. For more information, read: About your code repository Using Git Using SVN Using GitHub with Acquia Cloud Acquia Cloud does not support Mercurial (Hg). There are, however, tools that you can use to sync Mercurial and Git, as well as other version control systems. Can I use GitHub with Acquia Cloud? If you use Git, you may want to host your Git repository at GitHub to take advantage of their excellent Git support, pull requests with integrated code review, and other features. You can easily keep your site’s code in GitHub and still host it on Acquia Cloud. You can do this by setting up two "remotes" for your local repository clone, one at GitHub and one at Acquia Cloud. For more information, read Using GitHub with Acquia Cloud. Workflow Can I write to the file system using Drush? In normal mode, you can modify files in your docroot using the version control system (Git or SVN) and the Drupal /files directory is fully writable using Drush or other tools. In Live Development mode, your whole docroot is fully writable. For more information, read Editing code on your server. Acquia.com Forums Status