When we announced Acquia Dev Cloud at Drupalcon Chicago last month, we said it was primarily designed for professional developers who build and deploy multiples Drupal sites. Today, we are delivering one of the key features behind that promise: the ability to click to create and manage multiple sites on a single Dev Cloud account.
In case you haven't had a chance to watch the Dev Cloud webinar, here's a quick summary of what Dev Cloud offers:
- Acquia’s battle-tested LAMP and Drupal hosting stack, pre-configured and tuned for Drupal, used by some of the largest and best known Drupal sites and serving 2.2 billion hits in March alone.
- Separate development, testing, and production environments, each deployed automatically from a source-code repository.
- An incredibly easy to use, drag-and-drop developer workflow interface that lets you tag and deploy code, databases, and files across your development, testing and production environments.
- Automatic nightly and single-click on-demand backups and restores.
- Access to Acquia Network services for your site such as faceted search, spam blocking, in-depth performance monitoring.
With today's update, you can now create multiple, separate sites within your Dev Cloud account. All of your individual sites have all of the features listed above. Furthermore, each site runs as a separate Unix user with its own SSH keys, code repository, backups, Dev Cloud UI, and so on. This means your sites can safely run on the same server and even be managed by different teams for different clients.
Creating a new site on your Dev Cloud account is simple. Just visit the "Cloud" page on the UI:
The Site nickname is the human-readable name for the site; in this picture, I'm looking at the site whose nickname is "Dev Cloud Demo". The Dev Cloud username will be the site's Unix username, source-code repository name, default database name, etc. Fill out the form, press "Add site", and your new site will be ready in a few moments.
The number of sites you can put on your Dev Cloud account depends on the Acquia Network subscription you purchase. A Developer subscription can have up to three; a Professional subscription can have up to ten. We believe that Dev Cloud is an incredible value even for just a single site—for little more than the price of a dedicated VPS, you get a pre-configured, Drupal-tuned server with powerful developer workflow tools, automated backups, and several great add-on services. However, for multiple sites, it becomes an even better deal. For three sites, a Dev Cloud server with a Developer subscription works out to only $50/site/month, while for 10 sites a Dev Cloud server with a Professional subscription is only $27/site/month. The Pro subscription even includes 6 support tickets, for which we will answer questions about any aspect of your Drupal site, including questions about your own custom developed modules and themes.
