Summary
While promised presentation turned into a series of a few short articles, it should be still easy to read and understand for all Drupal sites owners, designers and developers. We not only answered all questions from Quora, but also included a more holistic overview of some core conceptions and important differences.
Here is a short summary of what we have discussed.
Acquia.comGetPantheon.comOmega8.cc
ACore Conceptions. There is a fundamental difference between managing every site as a Monolithic or Modular Drupal Codebase. While explaining all related details and implications will take probably another two or three articles, we have already explained the most important differences, so it should serve as a good overview of supported development environments.
BThe Holy Grail of Scalability. We have questioned popular beliefs about the Cloud, explaining why the Cloud Hosting is not the only or the best method to effectively scale resources while providing best possible performance. We look through the marketing buzzwords to discover the real stuff under the hood and help the reader to identify that Holy Grail you are looking for.
CThe Speed Matters. There are three known methods to make Drupal running fast: hide the slow backend behind a fast frontend, distribute the load across many fast backends, or remove all slow parts and dependencies. While all three vendors are fundamentally different here, and you can’t have everything, we explain why you shouldn’t worry too much.
DThe Pricing – does it have to be complex? All three vendors analyzed in this comparison use three different pricing methods, and it makes the comparison difficult, since we need to find some common denominator. This article includes a good overview on how deeply different these models are and which options we are comparing, and why not all of them.
EOpen Source – Myths and Reality. There is some controversy around open source versus vendor (proprietary) lock-in technology in the Drupal hosting. Is the open source a Golden Hammer? There is really drastic difference in the business model between vendors analyzed in this comparison, but does it matter anything for you as a hosting client?
FInnovation, Target and Focus. This article starts with inspiring quote on how Tim Cook wanted to join Apple 5 minutes into interview with Steve Jobs, and ends with well known quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Between those quotes we have discussed how all three vendors are different or similar when it comes to Innovation, Target and Focus.
$Price Comparison. While we will compare prices of as much comparable services from all three vendors as possible, it is important to point out that while Acquia.com Dev Cloud is a self-service platform, where you must take care about things like: detecting and responding to changes in traffic that require re-sizing servers or other changes in available resources, detecting and responding to denial of service attacks, restarting servers and recovering from backups – all of them are included by default in both GetPantheon.com and Omega8.cc comparable services, which makes both of them in fact more like fully managed and not self-managed. To compare the effective prices below, we will use the cost per site as a common denominator, even if Omega8.cc doesn’t use it. We will also compare monthly based subscriptions only, even if Omega8.cc offers substantial discounts for longer subscriptions. To better emphasize the effective differences, we will compare the costs of hosting one, five and ten Drupal sites.
The minimal cost of hosting one Drupal site, monthly:
- Acquia.com – $165
- GetPantheon.com – $100
- Omega8.cc – $24
The minimal cost of hosting five Drupal sites, monthly:
- Acquia.com – $316
- GetPantheon.com – $500
- Omega8.cc – $56
The minimal cost of hosting ten Drupal sites, monthly:
- Acquia.com – $316
- GetPantheon.com – $1000
- Omega8.cc – $112
Optional SSL support with dedicated IP, per certificate:
- Acquia.com – $30 monthly ($360 yearly)
- GetPantheon.com – $30 monthly ($360 yearly)
- Omega8.cc – $160 yearly
Please check more details in the article The Pricing – does it have to be complex? to better understand these differences and remember that the price-per-site doesn’t reflect comparable, included performance, and refers only to minimal costs when comparing the number of sites hosted.
There is no “pros and cons of each” in this comparison. We believe that “pros and cons of each” list belongs to opinion, and is highly contextual. Our comparison is only about facts, details and core conceptions/ideas, so any reader will be able to build his own list of “pros and cons of each” for his own context/use case.
You can find all listed above articles at: https://omega8.cc/compare
Happy hosting!