On June 30th 2021, Acquia ceased further development of their Dev Desktop 2 software. 

First of all, Acquia Cloud subscription start at $215 per month. At the end of this blog we shall look at alternative cloud development platforms for Drupal,

But well, lets look at some of the advantages of Acquia Cloud IDE for Drupal Development.

Before Drupal Cloud IDE:

1. There was little support for Drupal development for windows
2. Devs using Composer on windows had several timeouts and errors due to the slow write and read speeds for small files on windows machines
3. Collaboration was hectic as one had to spend endless hours configuring each other's dev environment & updating software (since well this had to be done manually)

Watch an Insight of more of this in the video below;

With Cloud IDE (Cloud Integrated Development Environment);

1. Since this is a managed machine hosted environment, you don't have to worry about software environments as everyone is always on the same setup
2. Development is done in a web browser tab. (Yes you heard it right everything from IDE to command line right in your web browser)
3. It's not limited by the speed of your laptop
4. Almost as fast as bare metal
5. Composer install is super fast
6. Config export/import is much faster
7. Refreshing databases from up stream is much faster (can be done in just minutes)

You can get your demo for Acquia cloud IDE here: https://www.acquia.com/ide

So, let's look for at affordable options;

1. I recommend the Cloud Ways hosting platform which can enable you create a staging optimized environment for Drupal for as low as $5 per month. 
   Sign up via this link here: to claim your first $15 credit for your first subscription
2. Another affordable option with versatile functionalities Digital Ocean. Claim your $100 worth of hosting credit valid for three months by following this link.
3. For those that love the good old cPanel experience, I recommend Interserver that also starts for as low as $5 for shared hosting accounts.

The reason I recommend those three platforms is that they offer ready off the top support for the latest version of mysql 5.7 and above without having to hassle around with php modules compared to most of the other hosting platforms I have experienced.