Acquia Cloud Platform is a managed platform as a service for customers’ Drupal applications. Acquia’s Cloud Platform Product Guide describes it as offered in tiers, Entry, Standard, Plus, Premium and Elite, with Premium and Elite containing all Standard features plus the additional features listed for each tier.[1] A separate Cloud Platform Enterprise Product Guide, last updated 2026-09-22, describes Cloud Platform Enterprise as a managed platform as a service for Drupal websites that includes all features of Cloud Platform plus further features such as the Platform CDN and the Acquia AI Provider.[2] Cloud Platform Professional is a self-service product with its own guide and billing page.[3][4] Acquia states that its Cloud Platform provides daily backups and runs on a platform whose uptime commitment is 99.95%.[5]
Licensing consists of three layers: the traffic entitlement measured in Views and Visits, the resource limits measured in Cloud Capacity Units, bandwidth and storage, and optional add-ons such as Performance Boost, the Enterprise Security Package and Platform CDN capacity. This article covers each in turn.
Editions
The Cloud Platform guide lists the following tier differences.[1]
| Tier | Additional features beyond Standard |
|---|---|
| Standard | Base features, subject to the service level policy |
| Plus | Plus level support; on-demand development environments |
| Premium | Premium level support; Enterprise Security Package; Team TAM; on-demand development environments |
| Elite | Elite level support; Enterprise Security Package; Team TAM; on-demand development environments |
The guide also describes a Cloud Platform Essential Package as a resource-based entitlement model built on Cloud Next infrastructure that provides a fixed-capacity environment governed by pod and PHP process limits across Production, Stage and Dev instances.[1] Cloud Platform CD environments, which are on-demand development environments with CD pipelines, are available in Cloud Platform CD subscriptions and can be added to Enterprise subscriptions; the number of environments is capped at the number on the Order, and the guide warns that they are not meant for production data.[2]
Acquia refers to two infrastructure generations. “Cloud Next” was released on 2021-03-24 and is available to newly provisioned applications that meet the eligibility requirements; applications on the earlier platform are called “Cloud Classic”, and customers are notified in advance of any upgrade.[2] Several limits differ between the two, as described below.
Metrics
Views
A View is defined as a request made to the customer’s application on the Acquia platform, excluding static files such as CSS and images.[1] Acquia’s usage documentation adds that Views exclude redirects, client errors and activity from certain known bots and crawlers, and that the count has no relationship to the Drupal Views module.[5] The platform counts Views at the Varnish layer and includes HTTP 2xx dynamic requests, including cached responses that bootstrapped Drupal before being cached; files delivered directly from the file system are not counted, but files delivered through Drupal, such as private files, are.[5] Only successful responses count: redirection, client error and server error responses are excluded, and OPTIONS requests do not count against traffic limits.[1]
Visits
A Unique Visit is one or more requests from the same client device within the same hour; Acquia may identify clients using headers or browser cookies.[1] The usage page gives an example in which two page loads within five minutes count as two Views and one Visit, and says that Visits are identified by IP, cookies or headers as determined by the implementation.[5] For every Cloud Platform subscription, the Visits capacity equals 30% of the Views capacity.[1]
Cloud Capacity Units, bandwidth and storage
Cloud Capacity Units (CCU) are calculated by Acquia from CPU utilization, memory utilization and data transfer between infrastructure layers.[1] The Enterprise guide supplies a formula for dedicated servers: every 4 GB of RAM is one CCU and every 2 CPU cores is one CCU.[2] Each Views tier carries a CCU limit and a bandwidth limit. The table runs from 100,000 Views and 30,000 Visits with 10 CCU and 2 TB of bandwidth up to 20,000,000 Views and 6,000,000 Visits with 95 CCU and 20 TB; above that the CCU limits are stated on Order Forms and bandwidth rises by 2.5 TB for each 2,500,000 Views.[1] Examples include 1,000,000 Views at 18 CCU and 2 TB, 5,000,000 Views at 35 CCU and 5 TB, and 10,000,000 Views at 55 CCU and 10 TB.[1]
For applications on Cloud Classic, all limits are the same except the CCU column, which is set at 1.8 times the Cloud Next values.[1] For Order Forms signed after 2023-01-01 that do not state a CCU limit, the limit is assumed to be 100 CCU.[1] Resource Limits can be increased by buying Performance Boosts, which add a quantity of CCUs stated on the Order Form for the Subscription Term but do not change storage limits.[1]
Storage on Cloud Next is structured as four independent limits per subscription: filesystem and database, each for production and for a shared non-production pool. A contracted 100 GB filesystem entitlement therefore provides 100 GB for production and a separate 100 GB shared across all non-production environments, and only the single highest-usage non-production environment is counted against the non-production entitlement at any time.[2] Scheduled and on-demand backups count toward the storage entitlement of the environment type in which they were created, while disaster recovery snapshots do not.[2] Storage boosts are sold in increments of 50 GB or 100 GB up to 1 TB per application.[2]
Counting and floors
Traffic overages
Acquia states that all customers receive a 30% capacity buffer: a customer that exceeds its monthly Traffic Entitlement by less than 30% is not charged overages.[1] Above the buffer, the customer can pay fees on the excess or enter a traffic upgrade for the rest of the term, and fees follow the fee schedule in Acquia’s then-current commercial price book unless the Order Form says otherwise.[1] The usage documentation adds that upgrades can be backdated to cover earlier overage months instead of paying overage fees, and that bills are calculated at the then-current rate card and invoiced monthly in arrears.[5]
At renewal, or at the start of a new term within a multi-year contract, a customer that exceeded its Traffic Entitlement in four or more of the most recent twelve months must upgrade to a tier that exceeds usage in ten of the twelve months, unless Acquia agrees otherwise.[1] The guide’s example: a customer with 10 million Views that used 12 million for eleven months and 20 million for one month must upgrade to exceed 12 million, treating the 20 million month as an outlier.[1] Acquia’s FAQ states that a plan cannot be reduced during a month of lower traffic, because plans are an annual commitment and reductions are possible only at renewal.[5]
Overage Forgiveness
New customers get an Overage Forgiveness Period of three months from the beginning of production traffic in the initial term, unless the Order Form says otherwise, during which no overage fees are invoiced.[1]
Non-production traffic and bots
Traffic on development, staging and other non-production environments counts toward Views and Visits. Acquia states that it generally amounts to less than 5% of total traffic and recommends 10% or more headroom ahead of launch.[5] If a customer buys a load testing environment, Acquia states it will never bill overages for activity on that environment, but load testing on Dev or Staging may be charged.[5]
Acquia excludes only ubiquitous, non-malicious bots, identified by user agent, and says the exclusion does not guarantee that all bots are removed; security scans, SEO optimizers and malicious bots are counted against subscription limits.[5] Third-party modules can inflate counts: the page warns that misconfigured site-alert modules with automatic refresh can substantially raise Views and Visits and cause overages.[5]
Resource limit enforcement
Acquia reserves the right to enforce resource limits on Cloud Next applications for memory, CPU, bandwidth and IOPS and for background processes.[1] For limits not visible in the user interface, the customer is not held responsible for violations before formal notification; after notice it has 60 days to reduce usage or buy a Performance Boost.[1] If Acquia becomes aware that infrastructure may be overloaded it can unilaterally add capacity up to three times the procured capacity, kept for at least five calendar days and billed monthly in arrears at the then-current rate card, and if the customer does not respond to three alert notifications Acquia removes it from monitoring.[2]
Virtualization and partitioning
Shared infrastructure carries use conditions. A customer that regularly consumes more than 20% of its assigned shared capacity (for example more than two times in any week), or that affects other customers, may be moved to dedicated infrastructure at its own expense.[2] Customers on shared infrastructure may not run load or vulnerability tests on live websites without purchasing dedicated infrastructure and giving at least five business days’ notice.[2]
Cloud and BYOL
The platform is hosted; there is no licence mobility. Acquia lists the AWS regions it uses: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU West (Dublin), EU Central (Frankfurt), APAC (Singapore, Sydney) and South America (Sao Paulo).[6] Multi-Region Failover keeps a synchronized production replica in a secondary AWS region, and the customer is responsible for choosing a failover region that satisfies its legal and data residency requirements.[1]
Add-ons
- Platform CDN. Limited to 200 GB of monthly bandwidth, ten domains and ten SSL certificates per subscription; exceeding any for two or more consecutive months requires engaging the account manager about Acquia Edge CDN, and additional capacity may need to be purchased.[2]
- Enterprise Security Package. Includes log forwarding to up to two remote destinations, IP allowlisting, GeoIP and custom VCL; optional paid add-ons cover network isolation (up to one hundred environments), private SSH access (up to twenty-five IP addresses or CIDR blocks), private VPN egress (one connection included, up to ten per private network) and VPC peering (likewise).[1]
- Single sign-on. Acquia SSO is provided at account level with entitlement to three identity providers and ten domains at no extra charge; more need an optional add-on.[1]
- Node.js. Deploying Node.js applications requires a Node.js platform package purchased with Cloud Platform Enterprise.[2]
- Cloud IDE. A single IDE entitlement may be provisioned with each subscription.[2]
- New Relic APM. Included with Professional, Enterprise and Site Factory subscriptions but restricted to Acquia-hosted applications. Enterprise subscriptions are limited to 250 GB of data ingest and five million APM events per month and one Full User, and overage applies if usage exceeds the limit by 20% in a month or by any amount in two consecutive months.[2]
- Acquia AI Provider. A gateway to supported large language models in Cloud Platform Enterprise, governed by annual AI Credit allocations. Credits consumed per request depend on model, tokens and region, the limit is enforced at subscription level and unused credits do not roll over.[2]
Cloud Platform Professional
Cloud Platform Professional requires a Developer or Professional Acquia subscription charged monthly, plus usage-based billing for server instances, disk storage and data transfer. Instance and disk usage are measured hourly and data transfer monthly.[4] The billing page states that disk storage costs USD 0.275 per GB per month, that each subscription includes 50 GB of data transfer per month (per subscription, not per server or website) and that added transfer costs USD 0.25 per GB; the page carries no date, so those figures should be confirmed at purchase.[4] The product guide states that a customer is entitled to up to six Users, that load balancers are shared and that load tests on live sites are not allowed.[3] Enterprise and Elite subscriptions cannot be cancelled in the user interface, and Enterprise and Site Factory billing is handled by the account manager.[4]
Programs
The Overage Forgiveness Period, the 30% capacity buffer and usage-based billing for Professional are the program-level constructs. No partner or volume programs are described in the guides reviewed.
Out of scope
This article does not cover Site Factory, Multi-Experience Operations, Acquia DAM or the marketing products. It does not set out service level policy detail, support tier response times, Acquia Edge or Acquia Search pricing, or Drupal itself. Order Forms may state different traffic definitions or tolerances.