Best Web Host for Drupal 7?

By coolguy_ar on 1 May 2011 at 10:32 UTC

Hi,

I'm new to Drupal, and currently developing my very first website using Drupal 7.0.

When I started to check out some web hosting solutions, I came across this problem of which will be the best solution to support Drupal 7.0?

Details of my Website -
It's a Photography Website, with Image gallery for starters! Might have a little bit of embedded jquery, but that might also be Phase-II.
That being the case, I don't need real huge amount of space right away, I can do with little space as well, since as I grow, I'll take up more space with time.

Some Web Hosting solutions I've checked out, based on Google -
1. HostGator - Some reviews say, it's the best for Drupal 7.0, is that so? It's slightly on the higher side - $5+ for every month for 1 yr Subsr.

2. BlueHost & JustHost - again, seems good from reviews - cost is average.

3. GreenGeeks - Something Drupal.org community supports? Haven't checked it out yet.

4. Whois & Godaddy - Basically domain sites, but they offer hosting solutions too. Cheap

5. Maiahost - Unknown solution, just landed there by chance.

Finally, what's the few things I'll need to keep in mind for my web hosting, especially, since it's going to have high res images, do I mainly look for higher bandwidth & data transfer options against space?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, as I'm looking to finalize something asap. I think I've almost bought my domain name, so I think I'll need this one real quick (my site on Drupal 7 is also almost up for the most naive look!)

Thanks,
Arun

Comments

My suggestion, 1. HostGator

whcomplete commented 1 May 2011 at 12:32

My suggestion,

1. HostGator - Overall Good for Drupal and good technical support (Best Buy $71/Yr with coupon)
2. Justhost or BlueHost or HostMonster (Ok to go with them and best buy $42 for Justhost with coupon)
3. Inmotion Hosting or MyHosting or any other good host.

I suggest you better go with Hostgator or Justhost for drupal.

The best hosting companies to

yngens commented 18 January 2013 at 12:59

The best hosting companies to host Drupal websites are listed on http://www.drupalspecific.com Do not go with general hosting companies as they do not optimize their servers for Drupal. Go with Drupal-centric hosting companies like http://www.acquia.com, http://www.drupion.com, http://www.drupaloptimized.com,
http://omega8.cc.

Careful - not unbiased advice

jamesoakley

English

North Yorkshire, UK

commented 18 January 2013 at 14:23

Just to be transparent, the user yngens who posted that link is (or certainly used to be) connected with one of the 4 companies they've just mentioned and that the drupalspecific site promotes.

There are high-end features that some web hosts implement, which gives extra versatility or performance that would help some kinds of Drupal users. As with all higher-end features, there's usually a price premium involved in providing them, and not every Drupal webmaster needs to have their hosting at the higher end.

The challenge is: If you go for a cheaper option, make sure you don't cut the wrong corners. Check carefully for reviews from existing users, and avoid any host who offers you "too good to be true", such as 50 GB for $2 per month. (Hard drives aren't that cheap).

This signature is currently blank

Dear James, It is like saying

yngens commented 19 January 2013 at 02:19

Dear James,

It is like saying "the user jamesoakley is connected with one of the 4 companies he put in his signature" with some portion of accusation. Common, my friend first of all there is nothing to accuse myself; secondly I just say what I believe is right without attacking/interrupting/criticizing opinions of others including yourself on hosting issues as it simply would be against fair business practices; thirdly I am not hiding the fact that I am associated with http://drupion.com - anyone can track the list of my posts to find out that fact, however at the same time I am not imposing the services only our company asserting that generally Drupal-specific hosting companies provide better services to Drupal websites. So please freely express yourself about anything, but please at the same time respect other people's opinion and don't try to make an impression they are hiding something.

Just to clarify a few things

jamesoakley

English

North Yorkshire, UK

commented 19 January 2013 at 20:07

Dear yngens,

I don't want to get drawn into a long argument. First of all, I apologise if it sounded that I was accusing you of maliciously trying to conceal your connection with Drupion. I don't believe you are, and I didn't mean to insinuate that.

What I was trying to do was to draw that connection out explicitly. Someone reading the post to which I responded may not have known the connection. The reason why I think that matters is that the marketing side of the web hosting industry is sullied by the fact that many promotional statements do not make clear what the promoter stands to gain by making their recommendation. You must get as sick of the "top ten reviews" sites as much as I do - it's all about affiliate marketing, but that's cloaked by real or fake "reviews" from customers and made to look as though it's impartial advice. In fact, a quick look at the affiliate payout rates, ranked, shows how it happens that you always get the same firms recommended - but the review sites are not transparent.

So by the same token, if someone's going to recommend a number of hosts, I feel they should be clear if they stand to gain if someone chooses one of those hosts. That helps the person reading the recommendation to understand the review more clearly. That's especially important on a Drupal.org forum section, the rules of which explicitly say that hosts are not allowed to promote their own services. You weren't self-promoting; you were promoting four different firms, only one of which you help run. But this forum section relies on transparency to help people weigh the advice that is given.

So on signatures - in some ways, if you had a forum signature that contained your link, that would be the simplest way for people to see this. I'm strongly against signature spam - people who post fluff posts just to gain signature exposure. It would be nice if the Drupal forums had the feature that vBulletin and others have, allowing you to opt individual posts out of showing your sig. That said, rightly used, a good signature helps show your hand and make sure people can see any conflicts of interest.

Anyway - that's enough. Apologies again for the misunderstanding!

This signature is currently blank

Fair enough, I've got a

yngens commented 21 January 2013 at 01:21

Fair enough, I've got a signature now. Though I didn't want to put any association in my signature before, because I work not only for Drupion and also freelance at the same time.

As for on where it is better to host a Drupal website I will remain convinced and will always try to convince others only the Drupal-centric hosting vendors can provide best-performing conditions for Drupal as they build their infrastructures to specifically match and meet Drupal requirements.

Hosts...

jsimonis commented 12 February 2013 at 06:05

You can also check with a host to see if they do such optimization. We host a number of sites, for instance, and our servers have had a number of optimizations, installs, etc. specifically for Drupal. From what I've seen over the last year or so, we're hardly the only one. I've seen a number of "general" hosts who also have servers where they've done such optimization on specific servers.

Host Gator Warning

kkentert commented 21 August 2013 at 17:53

This is an old thread, and that said, this information is from several years ago....but a warning about my experience.
(Again, this information is circa 2008..so take it with a grain of salt)

I was using host gator to host our companies website. The experience was great. Good server, good service - I was happy.

When development was complete, and the site was live, we ran google ads to drive traffic to our new site.

Our site went down. Not a technical problem, but a Hostgator problem. We had too much traffic (which was NOT a lot) and with no warning, and no notification, they simply turned out site off temporarily. They wouldn't turn it back on and said I just had to wait. I had to turn off google ads, lost a couple hundred dollars in clicks that went to out URL but displayed no website. I was told it was my fault and they did nothing.

Check and make sure that won't be a problem anymore before you sign up.

MDD Hosting

sedmi commented 2 May 2011 at 08:29

If you would be willing to try some smaller company you may try MDD Hosting.

All reviews I seen about them were by extra satisfied customers. Often times these smaller host provide excellent customer service with attention to details as every single customer matters a lot to them.

Otherwise Hostgator should be a great choice also. Here you can find nice comparison of MDD Hosting and Hostgator: WebmasterFormat: MDDHosting vs Hostgator

For the shared hosting listed

DaveSmall commented 2 May 2011 at 12:31

For the shared hosting listed in above, HostGator should be your best choice for a Drupal 7 site as it's the only one who offer php 5.3.x, the version Drupal 7 is recommended to work with.

My Suggestion Innohosting or EZPZ Hosting

kwaken commented 5 May 2011 at 03:10

Innohosting -> Servers and Support 10/10!

EZPZ Hosting -> Servers are ok. But excellent support.. 9/10

Disclaimer -> Check reviews are WHT. I have personal account with both of them.

If you check out Drupal

orong commented 6 August 2012 at 11:04

If you check out Drupal Hosting Review from HostUCan, you will find many true Drupal webmaster review from there. As most of web site owners share their site name there, you can go through those sites and test out the performance by yourself.

GreenGeeks is very promising based on the feedback of their customers. Inmotionhosting, HostGator and WebHostingHub are received some good reviews.

If you check the data carefully, you will find the most of happy customers of shared hosting are with site traffic within 600 page view per day and most of Drupal webmasters will choose VPS hosting once their site traffic go over 1000 page view per day.

Justhost

iamsixstringz commented 13 December 2011 at 20:38

Justhost is mediocre at best, I would only recommend it for static page hosting requiring very little traffic at this point. I have 4 sites hosted with them right now, and the more I build up Drupal (7.10) on their server, the more I have run around and tweak things to make it work in their environment. The response time is dismal, and there has been quite a bit of downtime lately, which is unacceptable, especially seeing as how the e-mail accounts attached to the domains go down with the site. (How great is that for a business site?!?!)

I'm taking a serious look at Rackspace right now. They are a little bit more money, but how much is several days of extreme frustration, backtracking, and not being able to access any part of your site at all worth to you?

Hosting...

jsimonis commented 29 December 2011 at 22:18

I switched over to Liquid Web a few years ago and have been there since. No problems and I've been able to upgrade my space as I've needed it (I started out in a small VPS where I hosted multiple Drupal sites, moved up through those and am now on a mid level Storm server).

After fighting with a client's buggy, slow, or outdated server, it is always nice to go back to sites hosted over on my space. I like having hosting with few issues and where I can contact Customer Service quickly for support, updates to server software, etc.

I use JustHost for drupal .

topwebhost commented 7 January 2012 at 14:34

I use JustHost for drupal . and register 4 years have a good price

No Godaddy

irensaltali commented 12 February 2012 at 15:28

I just looking for transfer my sites to another host from Godaddy. They sucks. They say all the things unlimited but when you start to demand new things, they start to say no you should buy this package. So my only suggestion to find host other than Godaddy

DrupalCafe

IgnacioAlonso commented 24 April 2012 at 19:35

http://www.drupalcafe.com/
DrupalCafe is a self sustainable through advertising campaigns using various advertising programs on this site only, your site will be Ad Free, No Popups or Gimmicks. So you need not worry about losing your website after many hours of dedicated work due to lack of funding to continue the services.

The 1and1 is definitely "NO

nextty commented 5 May 2012 at 19:35

The 1and1 is definitely "NO GO" shared hosting.
PHP memory limit is around 30M

Thanks to god that you are at

vikasbook commented 15 September 2012 at 07:17

Thanks to god that you are at drupal community There is thousands of member relate to hosting area and they support drupal 7 and other version. I think you need to make conversation with many providers that will be help full to improve your knowledge and cost too as you simplly shared about hostgator those charge is just $5 no doubt you may have better deal for your plans.

I simply suggest you Apoto which will take care of your requirements

Actually with any good

euro-space.net commented 28 September 2012 at 15:37

Actually with any good hosting provider you can host your Drupal website.. You need to ensure how reliable is that company first. Excluding VPS, on some cheap shared plans you can modify settings in the php.ini file so adjust necessary memory and other resources the CMS needs.

It's true, but sometimes it's

Peterson_s commented 31 October 2017 at 06:54

It's true, but sometimes it's hard to define which hosting provider is a good one. After all, people complain a lot about some of the most popular hosts.

If you choose any of the EIG

Fred8 commented 9 February 2013 at 04:26

If you choose any of the EIG hosts, better take a VPS that has at least 1Gb of RAM.

I'm going to wade into this

train commented 2 May 2013 at 15:37

I'm going to wade into this conversation since every time I search for Drupal 7 hosting, this thread pops up...

I work for a web design company and we use shared hosting to put our low-traffic Drupal accounts on. For a number of small sites, this works great... until the host drops the ball. Then you have a ton of ticked off clients.

That being said, Host Gator and Green Geeks have massively dropped the ball for us in the past. In fact I'm looking for a new host right now to replace Green Geeks. I understand these are low-dough accounts and perhaps don't warrant the attention of a larger account, but the tech support and problem resolution has been terrible with both. Which is a shame because the WHM/cPanel setup is perfect for how we do business.

Yes, I understand that Drupal sites are more resource intensive than most and I get how shared hosting works. But every time we have issues it's not because of our accounts, it's because of other accounts on the shared box.

The only company I can stand behind right now, from my experience, is InMotion. We've got a couple VPS accounts and a shared/business account with them. Tech support has been great, service has been great.

Our current server company

kkentert commented 21 August 2013 at 17:56

I just replied to a response that was the first response on this thread. Now, since there is a current post, I'll add to what I said there.
We no use a company called WiredTree for our hosting. they are available via phone for phone support, but their ticket system is amazing. They answer every request within 2-10 minutes. We currently have 3 servers with them and are happy with all 3. (They've even helped out with issues that had nothing to do with the server on several occasions)

While we're waking this

paulhudson commented 28 January 2014 at 09:26

While we're waking this thread up, I'll go ahead and throw our name into the hat.

As has been said above, some Drupal specific hosts are listed on http://www.drupalspecific.com (ourselves and a few other posters are included).

The https://drupal.org/hosting/paas page is also well worth looking at.

Drupal 7

Neosphere commented 23 January 2018 at 10:03

I'm utilizing Drupal 7 on an oversaw VPS with rosehosting. The folks at rosehosting introduced Drupal for me and they are extremely proficient in Drupal.