Through this blog, we shall discuss What is Drupal and What are the Best Drupal Hosting Providers and Plans for you to select from.
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a DIY(Do it Yourself) Content Management System(CMS) built to be easy to be use and extensive enough to design complex sites and structures. As of December 2016, the official Drupal site claims 1L+ contributors and actively community maintaining the software.
Along with developers love, Drupal enjoys a strong user community as well. You can use Drupal for variety of applications including but not limited to CMS, Ecommerce, blogging and much more.
Drupal is particularly known for:
- Single Click Installers
- Huge Developer community
- Good themes and high performing sites
- Technically more advanced and powerful than WordPress or Joomla
We assume that you have already decided to use drupal and your application is just a starter application. Therefore, we shall consider only the shared hosts which require the minimum upfront and monthly costs to operate the website
Drupal Web Hosting Provider: Points to consider
We have taken into account the following points while shortlisting the Joomla Web Hosting providers:
1. Memory:
Drupal is technically more advanced. Hence, it takes relatively more memory than a simple CMS like wordpress. We need to shortlist hosts that provide at least the bare minimum memory for Drupal to run.
2. Cost:
As a starter site, we need to find budget efficient hosting to start with. Therefore, we will restrict our search to shared hosts for now.
3. Technical Support:
As you are just starting up, you might need quite some support from hosting providers. So, we need to ensure that the service from hosting providers is top notch.
4. Technology Stack:
Joomla is built on top of PHP Language and uses mysql as a database. Mysql is a complex beast and optimizing of mysql requires quite an expertise.
5. Co-location:
A server which is closer to your audience will increase your website speed by miles. While shortlisting the best drupal hosting options, we have kept this point in mind. So, we have ensured that the web hosting company has data centres across most of the important areas of the world.
6. 1-Click Installers:
Many hosting providers provide 1-click installers which can get you started really quickly. Most of the shared hosts provide 1-click installers. So, we won’t consider the shared hosts which don’t provide single click installers.
With all that said, Here is our recommended list of Drupal Hosting Providers (in no particular order)*, which can get you started quickly and in cost and time efficient manner :
Drupal Hosting Providers: Best List to Know
Drupal Shared Hosting Providers :
Shared web hosting is a low cost hosting. In fact, it is the first touch point for everyone who wants to start a new website. May it be a blogging site, an e-commerce site or an informational site, drupal shared hosting is a common choice.
So, let’s have a look at popular Drupal Shared Web Hosting Providers and their plans. The drupal hosting providers that are well suited to a new website.
1. SiteGround:
This is an extremely popular shared hosting provider. SiteGround provides hosting services well suited for small and big websites alike. They have optimized their services extremely well to serve popular tools like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress etc.
Their shared hosting plan starts from 3.95USD only. It includes quite a few common features like 1-click installer, 24/7 support, SSD Storage, Free CDN etc. However, if you grow even a bit big, you will need a bit advanced features like Drupal Cacher. Now, these extra benefits come with higher pricing plans which can cost up to 7.95 USD/hour.
About Siteground:
Founded in 2004 by a few university friends, SiteGround gradually but steadily turned into a leading web hosting service provider. It started from only a handful of people working from their university dorm rooms in the beginning. Today the company has more than 400 employees and is constantly growing.
They process 1500+ tickets, 1000+ phone calls and 3000+ chat requests per day. Moreover, they proudly host more than 500,000 domains with this number growing by the hour.
2. GreenGeeks:
A new age webhosting company, GreenGeeks focuses on providing green hosting. So, basically as they say that web hosting industry is going to surpass airline industry by 2020 in terms of pollution. GreenGeeks aims to fix this by providing green web host in affordable range.
The prices starts from 2.95 USD per month and come fully featured with most of the features you expect like 1-click installer, PHPAdmin, mysql, 24/7 support, SSD drives etc.
About GreenGeeks:
GreenGeeks is Authentically North American Company. The company has been operational for 8+ years now and boasts of 3L+ hosted websites. The best thing that we liked about GreenGeeks is their commitment to providing green hosting.
3. Tmd Hosting:
This is one of the officially suggested hosts on the drupal site. TMD Hosting provides optimized managed drupal hosting and are quite popular in shared hosting. The web host provides a Managed drupal hosting solution and takes care of upgrading the Drupal as and when new releases are out in the market. This hosting comes with a 60 day money back offer as well
About TMDHosting:
TMDHosting has been there for more than 9 years now. They are well known for the multiple data center and 24/7 support.
4. Hostgator:
No Web hosting list is complete without the mention of Hostgator. Undoubtedly, Hostgator is a very popular Shared web hosting service. They provide optimized solutions for standard solutions like Drupal and are extremely good at it. Hostgator shared hosting plans start as low as $3.96 only.
In fact, Hostgator come loaded with most of the features that you will surely need. Moreover, you get benefits like unmetered bandwidth, 45-day money back guarantee, 24/7 support. You can also enjoy free migration on some plans and much more.
About Hostgator:
Started by Brent Oxley in October 2002, Hostgator is one of the leading shared web hosting provider today with its datacenters and support centers across the globe. The company is well known for growing quickly with their aggressive marketing techniques.
5. Bluehost:
No mention of shared hosting is complete without the mention of Bluehost. So, Bluehost is another popular Shared web hosting service. Bluehost shared hosting plans start as low as $2.95 and come loaded with most of the features that you will need like unmetered bandwidth, 45-day money back guarantee, 24/7 support etc. But, some services on bluehost are paid e.g migrating your website from another host can cost you quite a bit with bluehost.
About Bluehost:
Founded by Matt Heaton and Danny Ashworth in 2003, Bluehost is one of the leading shared web hosting provider today with its datacenters and support centers across the globe. The company now boasts of 2M+ websites across with world with a team of 750+ members serving their customers.
Drupal VPS hosting
Please check out this section only if you are an experienced Drupal user and your website is getting too much for a shared host to handle.
So, now when your business is growing, you will find it difficult to accommodate your website on a shared host. It is time now to shift on VPS web hosting.
VPS hosting can cost a bit more money than the shared host because the server has more capacity and there are lesser number of websites hosted on the same server.
So, here are a couple of good VPS hosting providers that can help with Joomla web hosting.
1. Inmotion Hosting:
This is a popular VPS hosting provider and is known very well for its top notch support. The VPS hosting at inmotion starts from $30 for a RAM of 4GB. If you have been updating to VPS hosting, 4GB is the minimum RAM that you should look forward to consider. Otherwise, there will be a need to shift the servers again very soon. The servers come very well equipped with 1 click etc though.
2. LiquidWeb:
A managed dedicated and VPS hosting service, LiquidWeb is also gaining popularity. Fully managed dedicated servers are really powerful and come with a minimum of 16GB of RAM and minimum costing of 199 USD/month. However, the servers include some really advanced CDNs, security features, builtin backups and some other really high tech features.
Hence, dedicated hosting is really recommended for people with really high traffic websites.
Drupal Hosting Providers & Plans:
We hope that this post will come in handy for you to chose the best Drupal hosting provider.
Have you tried using some of these Best Drupal hosting providers or any other hosting provider or plan? If yes, feel free to drop in comments. As always, do share such useful posts with friends and family .. 🙂 !!
