Last updated: May 20, 2025

Acquia Site Factory

Site Factory® provides a platform for creating and managing Drupal multisite deployments. Users can build, manage, and update websites using powerful multisite tools on top of Cloud Platform.

Site Factory leverages the Cloud Platform Enterprise platform, which is a fully managed, high availability, scalable, clustered platform built for complex Drupal websites with high performance and uptime requirements.

Key components of the Site Factory platform include the following:

• The Site Factory Administrative Console which provides web and API based management of Site Factory configuration and of websites running in the Factory
• Factory Stacks are managed Drupal code platforms and dedicated infrastructure

Acquia will provide the Site Factory services described below only if purchased by the Customer, as indicated in the Order.

1. Support Services

The level of Support Services for Site Factory shall be determined in accordance with the Subscription tier purchased by the Customer, as indicated in the Order and detailed in section 2.

1.1. Diagnosis Support

Diagnosis support entitles the Customer to engage Acquia in the diagnosis of the Site Factory platform and Drupal functionality issues during the development or operation of the Customer’s website(s) on the Site Factory platform. Acquia will identify and diagnose the root cause of such reported issue and provide the Customer with recommendations for repair to be implemented by the Customer. Diagnosis support includes support issues with the following:

• Site Factory Platform administration features and configuration
• Website(s) configuration and per-website theme configuration
• Website(s) not operating as expected in the Site Factory platform Drupal instance

Customer customizations to Drupal core files may limit Acquia’s ability to diagnose issues. Acquia may recommend or require the Customer to remove such customizations and replace them with alternate solutions using standard Drupal core and contributed modules, or other standard, published core patches. Furthermore, diagnosis support may be limited with modified Drupal contributed modules, certain integrations, or custom modules. Substitutions may be recommended by Acquia but are made at the sole discretion of the Customer. Diagnosis support does not include assistance with the installation, configuration, maintenance, or troubleshooting of other applications which the Customer has installed on its website(s). Acquia reserves the right to disable any non-supported applications to troubleshoot Drupal issues. Acquia may require the Customer to upgrade to a later or more stable release of a Drupal module or component for Acquia to continue with the diagnosis of an issue.

1.2. Site Factory Platform Support

In addition to the diagnosis support described above and the advisory support services as described in this section, Site Factory Support Subscriptions include the following Site Factory platform support services:

• Feature and maintenance updates, fixes, security alerts, and critical updates to the Site Factory platform
• How-to and technical assistance regarding the use of the Site Factory platform, including the following:
  • Customer access to the Site Factory platform
  • Customer management of websites and users through the Site Factory Administrative Console
  • Customer configuration and customization through Customer-side code and theming of website(s) through the Site Factory platform
  • Customer deployment of a Drupal codebase to staging and production environments

1.3. Acquia Support Services Process

The Customer may contact Support Services in accordance with the Support Users Guide and in accordance with the available urgency levels. Initial response times for support requests vary on the urgency level and the Customer’s Subscription tier.

2. Site Factory Subscriptions

Acquia will provide a site building and management system that is accessed through a browser-based user interface. Site Factory subscriptions allow the Customer to do the following actions:

• Perform administrative actions such as create, duplicate, export, and delete site(s) through the Site Factory Administrative Console
• Stage individual sites for development and testing purposes through the Site Factory Administrative Console
• Deploy code changes and database updates to production through the Site Factory Administrative Console

The Customer is responsible for maintaining and testing the Customer’s Drupal codebase in the Site Factory platform staging environment, and deploying the codebase as required. Acquia will update the Site Factory Administrative Console and resources with Factory Stacks.

Site Factory standard subscription entitlements include an initial Factory Stack, described as follows:

* An Enterprise 10 or Enterprise 25 subscription is for new Site Factory customers only, and must be part of a multi-year subscription. After the first year, the subscription must increase to an Site Factory Enterprise 100 or greater.

† For purposes of determining the maximum number of websites permitted under Customer’s Site Factory/Site Studio subscription, the term “website” or “site” shall be defined as the combination of a distinct custom domain and the distinct content uniquely associated with that domain. This limit shall not apply to any secondary or “vanity” domains which redirect to, or render the exact same content as, the primary domain associated with a website.

A Site Studio license is required for each site as defined above or where the production site is simply an html scrape of a staging site, for this staging URL.

Site Factory also includes SMB subscription entitlements similar to the previously described standard density offerings, with database sizes of no greater than 200 MB per site, and file storage no greater than 500 MB per site. The SMB offerings are described as follows:

* SMB 25 and 50 subscriptions are for new Site Factory customers only, and must be part of a multi-year subscription. After the first year, these subscriptions must increase to an Site Factory SMB 100 or greater.

† For purposes of determining the maximum number of websites permitted under Customer’s Site Factory subscription, the term “website” or “site” shall be defined as the combination of a distinct custom domain and the distinct content uniquely associated with that domain. This limit shall not apply to any secondary or “vanity” domains which redirect to, or render the exact same content as, the primary domain associated with a website.

For scope of support for Acquia Site Factory, see Site Factory subscriptions.

2.1. Factory Stacks

Factory Stacks can be added to Site Factory subscriptions. Each Factory Stack includes its own Page Views per month, maximum number of sites, and Drupal support tickets (as described in the previous table). Entitlements are not shared across Factory Stacks in a single Site Factory subscription.

2.2. Elite

As an optional add-on, any of the subscription tiers mentioned in this section can be upgraded to an Elite level. This will change the entitlements for the subscription as follows:

2.3. Platform Services

Acquia will maintain the Customer’s website(s) on the Site Factory platform during the Subscription Term. Acquia will use commercially reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorized access to the servers hosting the Customer’s website(s) and will promptly notify the Customer of any known security breaches. The Customer may submit an unlimited number of support requests related to the Site Factory platform.

2.4. Data Centers

The Site Factory platform utilizes an infrastructure that is physically remote from Acquia’s office facilities. A disaster affecting one or more of Acquia’s offices would not impact the availability of Customer websites or the security of Customer data. The Site Factory environment consists of major Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are separate, yet interconnected, data centers in major Regions in Acquia’s global infrastructure. The Site Factory platform utilizes a highly available, redundant architecture that distributes replicated redundant server types (load balancing, caching, web and database servers) across multiple Availability Zones in the same Region. In the event that service in Customer’s assigned Availability Zone (or Region) is severely impacted, Acquia will use commercially reasonable efforts to restore the services in an alternate Availability Zone in the same Region.

2.5. Backups

Acquia will provide Customer with a backup solution which includes the ability to back up a website’s code, static assets/files, and databases. Acquia reserves the right to delete any backups that exceed 365 days since their creation.

Additionally, Acquia will export MySQL database one time per day and retain these backups for three days. At the Drupal code layer, Customer-developed code may be managed and deployed by the Customer using Acquia’s Git code repository service for Site Factory PaaS subscriptions. This service allows for roll back and re-deployment of Drupal code, effectively backing up the Drupal layer so that the website’s code can be redeployed to a new web server instance as needed. However, automated file system backups will only be performed as noted in Section 2.6.

2.6. Disaster Recovery

The Site Factory platform will make hourly internal disaster recovery snapshots of Customer data. Acquia will retain these snapshots on a diminishing schedule for three months, as follows:

• The four most recent hourly snapshots
• Daily snapshots retained for one week
• Weekly snapshots retained for one month
• Monthly snapshots retained for three months

These backups will be used to restore Customer website(s) at another location in the same Region in the event of a total data center loss or a loss of multiple disk systems. Acquia will not provide the Customer access to these backups, and will not use these snapshots to restore website(s) due to data-loss or deletion by Customer.

2.7. Page Views

For Site Factory platform management and billing purposes, page views shall be calculated as the number of requests that are made to the Customer’s application on the Site Factory server(s) as may be counted by Acquia through industry standard means, which may include one or more of the following: applicable logs, CDN forwarded requests, trackers on Customer’s application for machine and other traffic, or as may otherwise be reasonably determined by Acquia.

If a customer is over its entitled Page Views, Acquia reserves the right to invoice at the current rate card overage at the end of each month, unless the customer chooses to contract a tier upgrade.

2.8. Traffic Overages

If Customer’s actual usage exceeds the capacity entitlement purchased in the applicable Order Form, Acquia shall be entitled to invoice Customer, and Customer agrees to pay the applicable additional fees for such usage (“Overage Fees”) in accordance with the terms set forth in the Agreement. Unless otherwise specified in an applicable Order Form, any such Overage Fees shall be determined by the applicable fee schedule set forth in Acquia’s then current commercial price book. Should Customer’s usage exceed the limit by less than 20% for a single month and subsequently the usage is reduced below limit, Customer will not be charged for those overages. Should customers exceed subscription limits by any amount for two consecutive months, then overages will be applicable at the stated rate. Customers will also have to pay the backdated amount. Acquia reserves the right to invoice customers at the end of each month if they are over 20% and have not responded to communications from Acquia or engaged with their account team directly. Fees for overages will be calculated and invoiced monthly in arrears at the then-current rate card.

Traffic associated with New Relic Synthetics usage as outlined in this document will only be taken into account upon receipt by Acquia of written confirmation from Customer that New Relic Synthetics was configured to monitor application uptime on one or more applications in the subscription during the period of elevated utilization. 

2.8.1. Overage Forgiveness

Overage Forgiveness provides an overage forgiveness period during which Customer will not be invoiced for any Overage Fees resulting from monthly Page Views exceeding Customer’s entitlement. Unless otherwise specified in an applicable Order Form, the Overage Forgiveness Period is defined as three (3) months from the beginning of production traffic in the initial term of a Cloud Platform Subscription Term (“Overage Forgiveness Period”), unless inaccurate information was provided to Acquia for sizing.

2.9. Best Practices

The Customer understands that they are responsible to build applications and workflows according to both Drupal and Site Factory best practices, unless otherwise understood and agreed by Acquia, including the following:

• Maintaining a configured PHP memory limit of no more than 256 MB for each website
• Storing no more than 1000 files per filesystem directory, and totalling no more than an average of 5 GB of file storage per website
• Maintaining no more than 1s PHP response time as indicated in server logs

For more information about best practices for your Site Factory websites, see the Site Factory product documentation.

2.10. Excessive Burdens

The Customer represents that it will not place excessive burdens (as indicated by Drupal and Site Factory best practices) on the Site Factory platform’s CPUs, servers, or other resources, including customer support services. The Customer understands that bandwidth connection speeds and other similar indices of capacity are maximum numbers. Consistently reaching these capacity numbers and / or significant deviation from application best practices as indicated in section 2.8 may result in Acquia’s need to place restrictions on the Customer’s use of the Site Factory platform services. The Customer further agrees that Acquia may place restrictions on the Customer’s use of the Services, including Support Services, to the extent they exceed the use of these resources for similarly situated customers.

2.11. Connector Module

The Customer agrees to keep the Site Factory Connector module up-to-date, meaning no more than three (3) versions behind the latest stable version available on Drupal.org.

3. Acquia Site Studio

Acquia may make available, for Customer provisioning, a one site license for Acquia Site Studio with each Site Factory subscription.

4. Cloud IDE

Acquia may make available, for Customer provisioning, a single IDE entitlement with each Cloud Platform subscription.

5. New Relic APM Services

New Relic Application Performance Monitoring (“New Relic APM”) licenses are included with Cloud Platform Professional, Cloud Platform Enterprise, and Site Factory subscriptions. New Relic APM provides Customer with access to New Relic APM Pro. New Relic APM Pro includes Lite access to Synthetics, Custom Events, New Relic One, and New Relic Browser. Access to such services is subject to change.

Use Restrictions: Use of New Relic APM is restricted to applications hosted on the Cloud Platform and cannot be utilized by non-Acquia services.

Use Limitations: Use of New Relic is subject to the following resource limits:

Site Factory customers are limited to 250 GB of data ingest per month per subscription, and five million APM Events per month per subscription. Customers are limited to 1 Full User per subscription. The New Relic Synthetics usage is limited to 9000 checks per month per subscription.

Should Customer’s usage exceed the resource limits for their subscription by 20% for a given month, they will be charged an overage fee determined by the applicable fee schedule set forth in Acquia’s then current commercial price book. Should Customer’s usage exceed a limit by less than 20% for a single month and subsequently usage is reduced below limit, Customer will not be charged for those overages. Should the customer exceed subscription limits by any amount for two consecutive months, then overages will be applicable at the stated rate. Customer will also have to pay the backdated amount.

6. Data Portability and Deletion

Upon request made by Customer within 7 days of termination or expiration of the Subscription Services, Acquia will make Customer Data and Customer Applications available to Customer for export or download. At the end of such 7-day period, Acquia will delete or otherwise render inaccessible any Customer Data and Customer Applications, unless legally prohibited. Acquia has no obligation to retain the Customer Data for Customer purposes after this 7-day post termination period.

Acquia Inc. reserves the right to change the Products and Services Guide based on prevailing market practices and the evolution of our products. Changes will not result in a degradation in the level of services provided during the period for which fees for such services have been paid.

Document ChangeLog

Site Factory Product Guide