How a U.S. Government News Agency Discovered 75% Hosting Savings with DevPanel on AWS

When a prominent U.S. government news agency—responsible for delivering over 1–2 billion pageviews per month—found themselves facing skyrocketing hosting costs and persistent technical limitations, they decided it was time for a change. Their mission: to modernize their infrastructure, reduce costs, and gain full control over their technology stack.

The solution? A hands-on proof of concept with DevPanel on AWS that revealed a clear path to:

• Cut hosting costs by over 75%
• Improve site performance
• Gain full infrastructure access
• Modernize their development platform
• Ensure compliance with federal security requirements

We recently published a detailed case study covering every step of this evaluation project—from the agency’s initial pain points to the results of performance, scalability, and cost testing on AWS. If your organization is wrestling with high hosting fees, inflexible infrastructure, or a need for greater autonomy, this story is a must-read.

👉 Download the full case study PDF here →

The Challenge: High Costs, Limited Access, and Frustrating Support

At the time of this project, the agency had only four of its 47 sites hosted on Acquia—but that alone was costing them nearly $1 million per year. Scaling to include all of their Drupal sites under the same model would have been financially unsustainable.

The issues went beyond cost. Technical teams struggled with:

• Limited infrastructure access—no root control, which hampered customizations and integrations.
• Slow, ticket-based support—routine changes often took days.
• Development friction—bugs and platform quirks disrupted workflows and collaboration.

The team needed a solution that offered cost-efficiency without sacrificing usability. They also wanted to regain technical sovereignty and bring their operations in line with modern, cloud-native best practices.

The Solution: DevPanel + AWS

Already familiar with AWS and its capabilities, the agency decided to evaluate self-hosting all Drupal sites on AWS. But they needed a control panel that could match (or exceed) Acquia’s ease of use while providing the flexibility and power they were missing.

Enter DevPanel—a secure, browser-based control panel that works inside your own AWS account. It offers:

• A point-and-click UI similar to Acquia
• Full root access to infrastructure and code
• VS Code in the browser, PhpMyAdmin, and built-in dev tools
• 24/7 hands-on support
• VPN access and air-gapped deployment support for compliance
• Seamless integration with AWS-native services

With DevPanel, the agency could run everything—including the control panel—inside their own account, ensuring full infrastructure sovereignty and complete alignment with federal cloud policies.

Project Execution: A Real-World Evaluation

In collaboration with the agency’s prime contractor, DevPanel ran a comprehensive proof of concept to test viability across four key areas:

1. Time & Effort Estimation

• Manual and automated site migrations were tested.
• On average, a site took less than 2 days to fully migrate, test, and validate.

2. Cost Comparison

• Estimated AWS hosting cost: ~$127K/year.
• With buffer and operational costs included: ~$200K/year.
• Compared to Acquia’s ~$1M/year, this yielded a projected 75–80% savings.

3. Performance Testing

• Sites hosted on AWS with DevPanel loaded significantly faster than on Acquia—even without cache optimization.
• Performance was measured using industry-standard tools like WebPageTest.org.

4. Scalability Testing

• The AWS setup handled sudden traffic spikes of over 1 million hits per minute.
• Infrastructure scaled automatically and gracefully, demonstrating enterprise-readiness for news and media workloads.

Results at a Glance

Feature / Metric	Acquia	DevPanel + AWS
Annual Cost	~$1,000,000	~$200,000
Dev Tools	Limited	VS Code, PhpMyAdmin
Root Access	No	Yes
Support	Slow, ticket-based	24/7 hands-on
Performance	Moderate	Significantly better
Scalability	Static	Auto-scaling w/ AWS

These improvements weren’t hypothetical—they were demonstrated and measured during the evaluation process.

Strategic Benefits

The proof of concept revealed that self-hosting with DevPanel + AWS wasn’t just about cost savings—it was about long-term operational transformation:

• Financial: Drastically reduced hosting costs and ended reliance on high-cost vendor lock-in.
• Operational: Developers could manage, deploy, and customize environments independently.
• Security & Compliance: The solution supported VPN-based access, root-level control, and government-grade security configurations.
• Scalability: Capable of supporting high-traffic, mission-critical news operations at global scale.

Is Your Organization Facing Similar Challenges?

If you’re spending six or seven figures annually on Drupal hosting, it might be time to rethink your approach. Especially if you’re dealing with:

• Inflexible platforms that block you from full control
• Slow, frustrating support systems
• Mounting pressure to reduce IT overhead
• A need to modernize for compliance or performance

DevPanel can help you explore what’s possible with your own cloud account on AWS—without reinventing the wheel or building everything from scratch.

Download the Full Case Study

Want to see all the details, charts, testing results, and infrastructure breakdowns from this proof-of-concept?

👉 Download the complete DevPanel + AWS case study here →

Inside the PDF, you’ll find:

• Full cost breakdowns
• Migration timelines
• Performance testing results
• Load testing visuals
• Infrastructure scaling metrics

Ready to Explore Your Own Migration?

This proof-of-concept showed how a large, complex organization could cut costs, improve performance, and take back control. You can do the same.

If you’re considering a migration—or even just curious what the savings might look like—we’d love to talk.

📅 Schedule a 15-minute discovery call
📬 Email: contact@devpanel.com
🌐 Visit: https://www.devpanel.com

Let us help you modernize, save money, and stay in control—on your own cloud.