Acquia, Which Provides Commercial Drupal Support, Delivers Search

We've covered Acquia, which delivers commercial support for the powerful Drupal content management system a number of times. Acquia also delivers its own distribution of Drupal, and the company's co-founder (and also founder of Drupal) Dries Buytaert has now announced that the company has come out of beta testing with its version of Acquia Search. It's available at no cost as part of every Acquia Network subscription. If you're looking for a free, open source tool to run a web site, and need solid search and inexpensive support, the one-two punch that Drupal and Acquia offer may be just right for you.

According to Dries' post:

"Basic and Professional subscribers have one 'search slice' and Enterprise subscribers have five 'search slices.' A slice includes the processing power to index your site, to do index updates, to store your index, and to process your site visitors' search queries. Each slice includes 10MB of indexing space - enough for a site with between 1,000 and 2,000 nodes. Customers who exceed the level included with their subscription may purchase additional slices. A ten-slice extension package costs an additional $1,000/year, and will cover an additional 10,000 - 20,000 nodes in an index of 100MB."

Dries adds that for his personal blog, which has about 900 nodes, a Basic Acquia Network subscription, at $349 a year, would give him all the benefits of Acquia Search, plus Network services. The OStatic site is based on Drupal, although we use open source Lucene to power our search functions. It's a good choice, but for many Drupal-based sites, Acquia Search, free with an Acquia Network subscription, may be the easiest way to integrate solid search technology.

If you're unfamiliar with Drupal and Acquia, view the screencasts found here. You can also "play" administrator of a Drupal site, without installing it, at OpenSourceCMS.