Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs Amazon Web Services

• The Acquia Cloud Hosting (enterprise) provides a three-server solution. You have a Development, Staging (or UAT), and Production servers with a clear path of deployment straight up the chain. You may use Acquia's own Cloud Hooks, or their web admin UI interface to deploy to any or all of the servers.
• Git is one of the foundation services built-in to the management of the website codebase. Allowing a developer, or well-trained end user (university employee) to easily deploy a tag or branch to any one of the servers, makes it very easy for us to offload the server / account management to the school, while we focus on improving their site.
• Not only does Acquia Cloud provide a multi-datacenter failover disaster recovery solution, but they also maintain a multi-region failover as well, which allows for a fully redundant enviroment to be maintained in two geographic regions. No fear of losing any database changes or form submissions from students.
• Lastly, the onboarding process is constantly being improved, and as I have been a third-party vendor involved in many of our hosting negotiations, I have seen it firsthand. Each enterprise client is assigned a small team of engineers, technical leads, and a pseudo-project-manager to explain the process in layman's terms to the client (university / college for my example), but they also perform a number of code reviews and best-practice analysis of a site prior to launch.

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• What I like in it, is its simple notification service which provides a mobile messaging feature to enable push messaging to my mobile devices as well.
• It helps in sending out notifications to all my teammates with full integrity.
• Responsive Support.
• Offers a variety of features that help to manage my workload.

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• Responses from tickets aren't always from the same person, and can vary in effectiveness of solving your problem
• While documentation is robust, it can be difficult to find exactly what you need
• Provided forums are not monitored frequently, and are not as useful as they could be

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• If there is one thing I think AWS needs improvement on, it is the administration dashboard. It can be a nightmare to use especially when trying to access billing. This could be made better, honestly, as there should be a simplified way to access simple admin features.
• While AWS was fairly easy to integrate into our solutions, it is not as easy to use without some IT knowledge. The dashboards are complicated and designed for someone who is computer savvy. If you are just want to keep track of billing, for example, you may need to take a course or spend a few hours with someone being walked through the admin console.
• AWS does tend to be slow at times. If you do not have a fast internet connection, it can take time to access services that are hosted on AWS. This is not always the case but we have had clients complain about this if they are trying to access a service from multiple points (IP addresses). The only real fix we found was to make our files cache to another server and only keep current data accessible to clients.

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• Our website isn't a revenue generator, so we don't have specific ROI calculations.
• The new website is helping us move off of a legacy on-prem server environment. The reduction of cost in maintaining those will be beneficial.
• We have had to invest in some training for our developers to learn Drupal.

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• AWS has lowered our employee cost, because you don't have to hire Network/Server Admins to manage infrastructure.
• Increased productivity by incorporating Continuous Integration with AWS and our development life cycle.
• Increased customer confidence by being able to provide HIPAA level security in our development and production environments

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