Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs Heroku Platform

• 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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• Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
• The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
• Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.

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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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• Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
• Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
• Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.

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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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• Heroku allowed us to get up and running fast. Deployment was really easy and connecting to our codebase was, too. The deployment integration with GitHub is pretty slick.
• The add-ons provisioning is so simple and the documentation is so thorough that, at least at first, it means you don't have to hire a dedicated devops person to manage this stuff.
• Heroku has tools that allow the collaborators (those with access to the Heroku dashboard) to be able to quickly and easily do triage from just about anywhere, including your smartphone.

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