I have to admit that I love to tinker with things. When I started playing with Linux first about 10 years ago, I realized that here was a "toy" that I'd be able to enjoy for a long, long time. I've often worked on server configuration and always had a lot of fun making servers work for big sites.
That said, I took Acquia's Dev Cloud for a spin and really like it. No hassles, it really has to be the simplest high-traffic ready system I've ever used.
If you don't know Dev Cloud, its a Drupal specific web hosting system. You get three separate "server environments" for each site - development, testing and live production. There is a web-based deployment tool to manage these environments. There are also some nice extras, like support, Apache Solr search and a handful of web services that you can use with your sites.
In my next post I'll go over how you get your site running on Dev Cloud and some of the best practices that we've found using it.
