Coinciding with the opening keynote of their CTO Dries Buytaert at DrupalCon Barcelona, Acquia today announced the expansion of their European business. In their PR statement, Acquia claims:

“With data centres now located in Germany, Ireland, and eight other regions around the globe, Acquia is the only Drupal platform service provider to offer pan-European support for high availability sites that accomodates EU data sovereignity requirements.”

We beg to differ.

Since 2010, we’ve been specialising in Drupal and WordPress hosting focused on high performance and availability; first under the “DrupalCONCEPT” brand and, starting in 2012, with our Managed Hosting Platform freistilbox. As an EU-based business, freistil IT has been compliant with EU data sovereignity requirements for over five years now. The data centres hosting our physical IT infrastructure are not only based in Germany but, equally important, also owned and operated by a German company.

On top of fully accomodating EU data sovereignity requirements, freistilbox is compliant with the German “Bundesdatenschutzgesetz” (BDSG) which is widely regarded as the strongest data protection legislation in Europe. German businesses that process client information protected by the BDSG are required to sign a “Vertrag zur Auftragsdatenverarbeitung”, a contract for the commissioned processing of data in which the hosting provider guarantees that both their technical infrastructure and their IT processes meet the strict requirements of the BDSG. The fact that we do has won us the trust of many privacy-conscious customers, for example the Federation of German Consumer Organisations and Doctors without Borders.

In conclusion, while we happily welcome Acquia’s initiative to strengthen the high-quality Drupal hosting market in Europe, we’d like to set the record straight that they’re certainly not the only provider of high-quality Drupal hosting accomodating EU data protection requirements, much less the first.

If you’d like to learn more about what freistilbox can do for you in terms of excellent website performance, high availability and data protection, shoot us a tweet or an email!