Case Study: Mother Jones boosts site performance and uptime with Acquia hosting and support

Using Commercial Support to Manage Open Source Drupal

Mother Jones, a nonprofit investigative magazine with a highly trafficked website (about 2.2 million monthly pageviews), moved to Drupal to enable social publishing and greater reader engagement. Their Drupal 5 implementation, however, suffered from performance and uptime problems, poor visibility into server and database behavior, spam and traffic spikes, and unstable custom theming—issues compounded by a fractured support model that left underlying causes undiagnosed.

After a 10‑hour review, Acquia was retained to provide hosting, support and remote administration; they added capacity, implemented reverse‑proxy full‑page caching, corrected inefficient core and theme customizations, fixed obscure caching mismatches, and guided a migration to Drupal 6. The result was faster, more precise diagnostics, improved performance and uptime, and a stabilized platform that lets Mother Jones focus on publishing, new features and reader engagement.

Mother Jones

Robert Wise

System Administrator