With Cloud Platform, you can choose a subscription package based on desired features and traffic volumes. By choosing the right traffic level for a given application, you pay for what you need. Acquia bases measured traffic levels on content that’s delivered to your end users. You can check your subscription usage every day within the Cloud Platform user interface.
Overage protection and traffic entitlement headroom
Acquia understands selecting the right subscription package can be difficult. Therefore, Acquia offers:
- 100% overage protection to all subscribers for their initial launch
- Extra 30% headroom for all subscribers over and above their subscription entitlement
Overage protection guarantees Acquia won’t charge any overage fees for the first three months of production traffic in the initial term of a Cloud Platform Subscription Term (“Overage Forgiveness Period”). Acquia’s overage protection allows you to have a risk-free launch with no surprises when your website goes live.
Once your site is live, you are still covered. If traffic is less than 30% over your selected subscription limit, you are not charged overages. Acquia understands that infrequent spikes must not result in unexpected costs, and slow growth throughout a year must not result in multiple contract amendments.
Even when you exceed your limit by more than 30%, Acquia does not simply send invoices. Acquia works with you to identify the best package to fit your needs. Some of the options include a permanent upgrade to your subscription or the option to pay a one-time overage fee. This flexibility ensures that you contract only for what you need, when you need it.
Upon each renewal or start of any new term in a multi-year contract, your account manager reviews your traffic. If you consistently exceed your contracted limit, your account is placed in a more appropriate subscription tier.
Usage limit FAQs
The following section has a list of common questions about usage limits, Views, and Visits.
How does Acquia calculate monthly traffic?
Acquia calculates monthly usage based on requests made to the Content Management System (CMS) measured by Views and Visits.
What’s a View?
Views are any requests made to your Acquia-hosted Drupal application. Views exclude static content (image, CSS, JS, etc.), redirect requests, client errors, and activity originating from certain known bots and crawlers. This ensures that you do not pay for:
- Errors delivered to your site visitors
- Extra hop that some visitors take when they are redirected
- Noise generated by the most common bots that impact Acquia’s customers
Views count is not related to the Drupal Views module, or content returned by that module.
What’s a Visit?
A Visit is one or more Views from the same user agent within the same hour. You can identify user agents based on IP, cookies, or headers as determined by the implementation.
Example: A user navigates to a website at 10:15 AM, browsing to the homepage and the About Us page within five minutes. Assuming only a single request that meets the definition of a View is triggered when the user navigates to each page, this counts as two Views and one Visit.
How does Acquia measure Views and Visits?
The Cloud Platform platform uses data collected and logged by the platform to calculate Views and Visits. Specifically, Cloud Platform counts views at the Varnish® layer and includes Dynamic Requests (HTTP 2xx status requests) served. Acquia excludes the following requests when calculating the total amount of Views:
- Requests generated by certain known bots
- Requests generated by Acquia uptime monitoring tools
- HTTP 3xx (redirect), HTTP 4xx (client error), and and HTTP 5xx (server error) status requests
Acquia includes requests served out of Varnish cache in the count if those requests bootstrapped Drupal before being cached. Therefore, Acquia does not include any files that are delivered directly from the file system without bootstrapping Drupal. However, if such files are delivered instead through Drupal, Acquia counts them.
Where can I see Views and Visits data for my application?
The data for Views and Visits is available to subscribers with administrator permissions in the Cloud Platform user interface. You can view subscription usage at the subscription, application, or environment level, and identify usage patterns and anomalies, and remedy them. For help with viewing your subscription’s usage information, see Viewing your subscription’s usage summary and detailed usage.
What happens if a website is close to going over the limit?
The Cloud Platform user interface includes an alert which will let you know when you approach or exceed your usage limit. Acquia doesn’t send automated email alerts, but your Account Manager may reach out to you if you approach or exceed your limit.
After you exceed your limit, Acquia still provides you an extra 30% headroom before any overages become applicable.
Over what timeframe are Views and Visits captured?
Views and Visits are tracked on a daily basis and then aggregated into monthly totals. Acquia defines Views and Visits entitlements included with a subscription on the basis of a calendar month. For a partial month, Acquia will prorate Views and Visits entitlements for the applicable number of days.
Why do Acquia’s numbers for Views and Visits differ from my web analytics tools?
When calculating Views, Acquia considers much of the activity generated by subscribers’ applications. While analytics tools measure cases of page loads, Acquia measures a level below these page loads, aggregating requests that reach Acquia’s platform.
Several factors can contribute to the differences you might see in Acquia’s calculation of Views and Visits versus similar tools from other vendors:
| Factors causing variability | Net Impact |
|---|---|
| Custom filtering you have implemented in your analytics tool | Acquia considers all infrastructure-side traffic in the total count of Views and Unique Visits, including traffic that may be filtered out of client-side collections. |
| Differences caused by client-side versus infrastructure-side data collection | Client-side collection requires users to accept JavaScript. May apply to a subset of website traffic, and may be filtered out leading to lower client-side collection counts. Client-side counts may be larger than Acquia’s Views and Unique Visits counts if a CDN sits between client-side and infrastructure-side, filtering out most traffic before it reaches the infrastructure. |
| Traffic served by a CDN if you’re using one (including Acquia Edge) | Using a CDN other than the Platform CDN, decreases Acquia’s collection of Views and Unique Visits, as some website traffic is filtered and not counted as Views and Unique Visits. |
| Administrators and editors accessing the back end of the application to make content or configuration changes | Views and Unique Visits counts include administrators and editors accessing the back end, but these may be filtered from client-side collection. These tend to be extremely small unless testing is being done. |
| Decoupled or mobile systems accessing your application over an API | Views and Unique Visits include API calls, if such API calls result in a successful (2xx) non-static non-Option request. However, these may not be tracked by client-side collection. |
| Tracking across multiple environments | Client-side tracking generally measures only activity hitting a prod environment. Views and Unique Visits counts include activity that hits any dev, staging, or other non-prod environments as well. |
| Client side use of ad-blockers | Client-side tracking doesn’t capture activity from users who have implemented ad-blockers. Views and Unique Visits counts include activity from all users, regardless of their implementation of third party software. |
| Use of private file systems which bootstrap Drupal | Views and Unique Visits counts include requests that bootstrap Drupal. This includes requests delivered through the use of private file systems. Private files cannot be accessed by servers directly. When requested, Drupal determines whether the user has permission to access such specific files. This requires the system to bootstrap Drupal. Such requests are treated as separate HTTP(s) requests. Therefore, the requests are counted towards Views and Visits. Client-side tracking excludes such requests. Views and Unique Visits counts exclude static content such as images, CSS, and JS. Typically, these are public files in webroot and server has direct access to them while serving HTML. |
| Frequency and use of uptime monitoring and security scanning tools | Uptime monitoring and security scanning tools generally bypass client-side tracking. Views and Unique Visits counts include activity generated by these services provided they bootstrap Drupal, as these tools put meaningful load on Acquia’s platform. |
| Using the Sitewide Alert and Site Alert modules | If you do not configure these modules correctly, Views and Visits for your application might substantially increase and this can cause overages for your Cloud Platform subscription. For example, in the Sitewide Alert module, you must be cautious while using the following configuration options:
|
Acquia’s billing will always be based on the total number of Views and Visits, and not on the numbers displayed in other analytics tools.
Does Cloud Platform track any identifying information for my application’s users?
Cloud Platform doesn’t track any identifying information for your application’s users.
How do I know what size plan I need?
Estimating required sizing begins with analyzing historical (for existing applications) and anticipated (for new applications) traffic volumes. Acquia helps you in finding a good starting point. With overage protection, you are guaranteed a no-risk launch and with a 30% capacity buffer, Acquia ensures that you have a reasonable margin of error allowed in your estimates.
What happens if I choose the wrong plan?
Acquia works with you to choose the best plan based on your available data, but from time to time Acquia might still miss the mark. With an Overage Forgiveness Period at the time of your site launch and with a 30% capacity buffer available to all subscribers before overages kick in, you have time to react without incurring any additional costs. At any time during your subscription term, you can upgrade your plan or, if you have selected too large a size, reduce your entitlement upon renewal.
Can I decrease my plan size during a month when I expect lower traffic?
Cloud Platform plans are an annual commitment. Therefore, decreasing subscription traffic volumes is only possible during contract renewal.
If my traffic is highly seasonal, can I have different plan sizes throughout the year?
Acquia can find a plan that fits your needs. While the 30% additional headroom provides most customers with necessary flexibility across seasonal traffic patterns, Acquia understands that some seasonal spikes can be much larger. Work with your account manager or account executive to ensure that Acquia designs a plan that best fits your seasonal traffic pattern and to mitigate any surprises when your big season arrives.
What happens if I have an overage?
The Cloud Platform user interface displays alerts whenever you approach or exceed your plan’s limits. This ensures that you always know when you must think about your traffic.
You do not incur overages until you exceed your Traffic Entitlement by more than 30%. If you have an overage during any particular calendar month, you still have a few options. This includes temporarily upgrading your Traffic Entitlement through the end of your current term, permanently upgrading your Traffic Entitlement through the end of your subscription, or paying a one-time overage fee.
For temporary and permanent Traffic Entitlement upgrades, customers can backdate the effective date of those upgrades to cover prior overages instead of paying overage fees.
If you opt to pay overages, they are calculated using the then-current rate card and will be billed monthly in arrears. When choosing this option, you only pay for traffic that exceeds the 30% capacity buffer provided. With these options, you can rest assured that Acquia does not send an unexpected invoice.
Acquia recommends that you upgrade your subscription if you expect continued elevated traffic in the future.When upgrading your subscription, Acquia makes it possible to upgrade as of the date you began incurring overages instead of paying for the overages in addition to upgrading. For more information about contract upgrades (including how to handle seasonal spikes) and for help in determining the best solution for your needs, contact your account manager.
Does bot traffic count towards Views and Visits?
Acquia’s Cloud Platform subscriptions are created with an understanding that nearly 30% of all site requests come from ubiquitous, non-malicious background bots, crawlers, and scrapers deployed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and other data-intensive companies. With the proliferation of AI, these volumes continue to increase.
Acquia removes this background noise by excluding traffic from these ubiquitous, non-malicious bots from the calculations. These bots are identified through the user agent data that is passed to the platform.
This does not guarantee the exclusion of all bots from the count of Views and Visits. Some bots impersonate human traffic and their traffic is not excluded.
Although common bot traffic is removed from the counts of Views and Visits, this traffic still generates load on your application. You can use Acquia Cloud Edge and other Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions to block malicious or unwanted traffic. For more information about protecting your website from malicious bot traffic, see the Acquia Knowledge Base.
How does Acquia determine which bots are excluded from Acquia Views and Acquia Visits?
The intent of excluding certain known bots is to identify ubiquitous sources of bot traffic that impact a majority of our customers. In identifying these bots, Acquia observes traffic patterns across the entire platform and evaluates sources of traffic impacting a large number of customers with a significant volume of requests. Acquia considers the purpose of these bots and ensures they are non-malicious and desirable. A non-exhaustive list of user agents that have been tagged for exclusion includes:
Googlebot, Bingbot, Tandexbot, Applebot, LinkedInBot, facebookexternalhit, GPTBot, DuckDuckBot, Baiduspider, Sogou spider, CCbot, AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, Rogerbot, Swiftbot, Yahoo! Slurp, NaverBot, Twitterbot, SiteMonistor, and many more.
While such agents impact nearly all of Acquia’s customers, individual decisions to implement or allow more targeted bot traffic to reach an application do not represent ubiquitous, common bot traffic. Such traffic might include security scans, SEO optimizers, and malicious bot activity. As such activity cannot be incorporated universally into Acquia’s subscription model, usage from these types of agents is captured in Acquia Views and Acquia Visits counts and is measured against subscription limits. This provides customers with the choice whether to allow traffic from these sources. As this approach is non-exhaustive, Acquia offers a 30% capacity buffer on all subscriptions, allowing for unexpected or unknown traffic without having to deal with overages.
What infrastructure is included to support my applications?
The Cloud Platform platform ensures you have all the infrastructure required to support your expected traffic and potential traffic spikes. All Cloud Platform subscriptions run on Acquia’s scalable cloud platform with a 99.95% uptime SLA.
Activity on non-production environments and tracking against Views and Visits entitlements
Acquia’s usage tracker includes data from traffic that hits non-production environments, such as Dev or Staging.
This activity is counted against Views and Visits entitlements for several reasons:
- Non-production environments are integrated with Acquia’s offering. Thus, you can fully build, vet, and test your applications prior to fully deploying or going live.
- Generally, activity on non-production environments constitutes less than 5% of the total traffic. Prior to a launch, the traffic in these environments peaks. Acquia recommends that you maintain 10% or more headroom on your subscription in anticipation of potential spikes. This includes incremental development activity.
- Acquia doesn’t charge any additional costs if your non-production environments require additional resources. While you can’t perform load testing in these environments, Acquia ensures that you’re able to build your most ambitious applications on Acquia as part of your core subscription.
Acquia does not want to discourage normal development activities over concerns about the impact of non-production traffic on a subscription’s total utilization, however we do need to discourage non-production environments from being used for live sites or load-test-like activities. If you are concerned about exceeding your monthly traffic allocations, contact your Acquia account managers and they will help you determine the best approach for your business needs.