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Drupal support - Acquia worth it for forums alone?

Elder Brother's picture
Thu, 26/08/2010 - 10:56 — Elder Brother

Hello.

I'm a fledgling developer and designer wading through my first (and reasonably substantial) Drupal project.

Time being of the essence, and with the increasing need to alter hooks, preprocesses, etc. I am looking for prompt and reliable support.

I have a trial account with Acquia, and am wondering how many people subscribe to them for services - at this point I can only consider the basic forums support package. I would be interested to hear of any experiences of them long-term - If you keep battering them with questions for a number of months, are they always eager to please, or does their responsiveness tail off after the trial period?

I would also be interested to hear of any other similar remote support services available from a UK outfit.

 

Many thanks,

Will.

 

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Thu, 26/08/2010 - 15:35 — Ben Goodson

Hi Will,If you can I would

Hi Will,

If you can I would definitely recommend going to the next Drupal Pub meet up.  You'll meet a cross section of the UK Drupal community, some independant experts and some development houses who have strong experience in delivering large Drupal sites.  I have no experience using Acquia so cannot comment - essentially everything I have learned through doing and reading about doing!  I will say that I have used ixishosting now twice for local Government projects (they have a managed Drupal environment) and I have found them to be very good.  Their Drupal team is small but they seem to know quite a bit and I have asked them questions outside of the usual hosting-related stuff.

 

Ben

Tue, 31/08/2010 - 13:14 — peter_g
peter_g's picture

Welcome to Drupal!

Will --

Welcome to the Drupal community! Thanks for thinking of Acquia to help support you on your first project. I run Acquia's support and services organizations, and someone forwarded your note to me. I hope it's alright, but I thought I'd respond directly for your benefit, and for anyone else who comes across your post.

Our basic subscription is designed specifically for professionals like yourself looking for access to advice and services. Included in the basic subscription are the following:

  • Access to Support Forums -- Acquia advisors respond to all posts in our forums, and can provide a broad manner of help and advice; everything from help resolving issues during development to advice on modules and everything in between. Response time is typically within 24-48 hours at the latest, and there are no limits on how much you can contact us through the forums. 
  • Access to Acquia Library -- All network subscribers have access to 'library.acquia.com', a searchable knowledge base with a growing volume of articles detailing issues/resolution, how-to's, best practices, and more. Our customer advisors, consultants, and engineers are constantly adding to this library, so you benefit from the full depth of Acquia staff.
  • Acquia Search -- I would argue that this is probably our most valuable asset to subscribers. Acquia Search is a fully hosted Apache Solr service (more details here: http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-search) that takes the heavy lifting out of using faceted, contextualized search in your builds. Almost all of our subscribers use Acquia Search, and we're very proud of the service. 
  • Mollom Spam Filtering -- Included in all of our subscriptions is Mollum spam filtering. We provide access to Mollum Plus at no additional charge to all basic subscribers.

There are even more services in the roadmap that we plan to roll out to subscribers (all at no additional charge), as we work to improve the value of the subscription to folks like yourself. If there's something you'd like to see specifically, please let us know (peterg -at- acquia -dot- com). I hope you try a subscription with us, and look forward to your feedback.

Peter G.