Streamlining Website Management: AMA's AWS Migration with DevPanel

The Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) is the largest model aviation nonprofit in the United States, overseeing a network of over 30 websites dedicated to its members, local clubs, and educational initiatives. The management of these sites, which were built on various platforms including Drupal, WordPress, and Backdrop, became increasingly challenging for AMA's small digital team. Traditional managed hosting providers led to significant bottlenecks, requiring developers to wait for vendors to set up test environments, while security updates were often outsourced, complicating simple infrastructure tasks.

In pursuit of scalability and cost control, AMA sought to migrate to AWS but faced limitations due to their limited in-house cloud expertise. To facilitate this transition, they turned to DevPanel, which offers a user-friendly cloud development and hosting dashboard that simplifies AWS complexities. Within a few weeks, AMA successfully migrated all 30+ websites to AWS using DevPanel, consolidating their operations into a single, efficient dashboard.

The results of this migration were transformative. Tasks that previously required a team could now be handled by just one person. Developers gained the ability to create development, testing, and staging environments instantly, eliminating the need for ticket submissions. Additionally, security measures, SSL management, and CI/CD pipelines became fully automated, significantly reducing infrastructure costs through AWS optimization and granting the team greater independence from hosting vendors.