I have been using Drupal since version 5, and I am very concerned with Drupal 7s performance on shared hosting. There are numerous post on Drupal.org and elsewhere on the web where people are expressing concern about Drupal 7s performance on shared hosting. If you google Drupal 7 performance, the majority of the results lead to negative reviews of how Drupal 7 performs on shared hosting.
The clients I work with are small businesses and need to start out with shared hosting, and as their audience grows, they transition to more robust hosting options. I am talking about brochure sites, blogs, directories, portfolio sites, small communities and small e-commerce sites.
All of my potential projects are at a standstill because of this issue. It makes no sense to do a Drupal 6 implementation, if Drupal 7 is not a viable upgrade option because of poor shared hosting performance. I can only assume Drupal 8s performance on shared hosting will be even worse. I am being forced to look at other CMS options. Before Drupal 7, there was no real need to look any place else.
Is Drupal totally abandoning shared hosting in favor of bigger sites? Does Drupal not want to be the foundation for the next great blog or news site that is being bootstrapped like many of the top blogs right now? It certainly seems that way at this point. Mashable and many other top blogs started on shared hosting and grew from there. Is this segment being abandoned?
It would be nice if the thought leaders behind Drupal could address this issue formally in a blog post, so that the community can decide whether Drupal will be able to fulfil the needs of their future projects that require the use of shared hosting. I think this a critical issue for Drupal implementers to know about the future of Drupal.
The latest version of Wordpress does not have this issue, and some of us are being forced in that direction because it seems that Drupal no longer cares about potential shared hosting customers. It is going to be very hard for Drupal to compete with Wordpress if each new release is slower and slower on shared hosting. Most of the top 100 blogs of today started out on shared hosting and grew from there, and the majority are on Wordpress. The top blogs of tomorrow are starting today on Wordpress and I don't think Drupal 7 is helping. I think it leads to a smaller market share. It is unfortunate that Drupal is creating new roadblocks to wider adoption.
I would really like someone to outline a long term strategy for how Drupal 7 and beyond is going to deal with shared hosting performance balanced against user experience, and scalability initiatives. These days all the talk is about user experience without factoring in that slow performance creates a very bad user experience, and impacts the adoption of Drupal in a negative way.
It seems like Drupal is at a crossroads where Drupal will be used by fewer power sites and not used more by the masses of bootstrappers just starting out. It seems odd to have as a goal for Drupal to be more widely adopted, but release a product that is significantly slower for the majority of people that are going to experience Drupal for the first time, unless the Drupal leadership is abandoning shared hosting in favor of more upscale sites.
Can someone please address this issue, so that people in the Drupal community that have shared hosting clients can decide if Drupal will be a viable solution / option in the future or not?
Comments
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imo performance is always on the minds of core developers. See http://drupal.org/node/367257 (and the link at the bottom of that page) for some info.
Core Performance
It seems for Drupal 7 the core developers focused on scalability and not shared hosting performance. Some of the responses to other people's concerns about Drupal 7's bad shared hosting performance talk about how Drupal 7 is more scalable and how it now supports things like Varnish. I have also seen references to high-end implementations which I don't think are relevant for the majority of people considering Drupal for the first time, or people that are comparing Drupal to Wordpress.
Wordpress has a much stronger focus on shared hosting performance. I read some posts about the future of Wordpress and one of the main things they mention is performance. I really would love to hear form some of the core developers about how this is going to be address or if they really care. If Drupal is not going to be a viable shared hosting option, that needs to be clearly articulated. I have been checking back here and elsewhere for the last few months, and there does not seem to be a real emphasis on dealing with this issue.
VPS
It's true that Drupal 7 needs for example more RAM than Drupal 6.
A possible solution for small sites is to start on a free or cheap Drupal hosted solution such as Drupal Gardens (D7) or Buzzr (D6?), and to move for example to a $20 VPS such as Linode when growing.
Drupal 7 Performance
I guess my main concern is whether there is going to be some sort of initiative to fix this problem. Everything on Dries blog is about Drupal 8. I think this issue will/is hindering Drupal 7's adoption. I have seen several posts of people trying Drupal 7 and then going back to Drupal 6 because of Drupal 7's poor performance.
If the core developers don't think this is important, then people that are developing smaller sites have to look elsewhere for a CMS solution. Generally, people starting blogs, portfolio sites, small social networks, small directories, brochure sites, don't start out with VPS or above. This portion of the Drupal user base has basically been abandoned with Drupal 7.
Boost (performance module)
I think shared hosting was in the mind for issues such as #281405: Drupal 7.x can't be installed with memory_limit=32M, but it seems inevitable that the system requirements are higher for D7 (minimum 32M memory_limit) than for D6 (16M), given the greater functionality added into core. And more resources are needed depending on modules installed, configuration, etc.
For performance, see Drupal caching, speed and performance. Particularly, the Boost module can greatly help sites on shared hosting.
Aegir for easy VPS, etc.
thehiro wrote:
If the mentioned solutions for small sites on shared hosting are not enough, in those cases it's not so difficult to use a cheap, unmanaged VPS by installing a control panel such as Aegir, ISPConfig, Virtualmin, etc.
I would recommend Aegir, a Drupal distribution that can easily install, backup, update, etc. Drupal sites and other Drupal distributions (like OpenPublish, NodeStream, etc.) on your VPS or server.
New related handbook page
I've just started the new handbook page Site building: beginner, intermediate, advanced in the drupal,org's documentation, including several of the solutions for shared hosting and VPS mentioned on this thread.
@thehiro my take on this is
@thehiro my take on this is sticking to Drupal 6 for infinite time. There are really no path breaking features for my site users that D 7 or D 8 offers. D 7 and D 8 are now all geeks playground with removing some useful modules or adding some useless overlays, and nothing really new for the end users.
Security issues are managable, only thing that we need is hosting environment support. Already talk is on so that many shared hosts will come forward with a maintained php 5x environment for eternity so that millions of site, not just Drupal, who are small or medium and not in a position to upgrade or never will, do not become dead and extinct and lost from the wwweb. You can call this as Old Age Home for our sites but soon many sites will need this, have this, and thus continue to be "young" and adding variety to the cookie cutter web that the web is now courtesy of Facebook.
D 6 support communities can grow outside d org, and we need this as we need to survive. On the other hand Dries and team needs to make D complex and "uptodate" as they also need to survive in their business model :)
APC
Just wanted to chime in on this in case anyone else out there who's using Drupal 7 on shared hosting is feeling forlorn about performance. With a recent D7 site I needed to implement a shopping cart and some other dynamic features that just wouldn't allow for the usage of the Boost module. After playing with all of my options, including considering just dropping 7 in favor of 6, I discovered that my host allows me to run my own install of APC on the shared hosting account. As soon as this was up and running and the cache warmed up the results were astonishing. YMMV.
Obviously this wouldn't be acceptable for large sites with big caches, but then why would you be using shared hosting? The long and short of it is that if your host allows it on a shared account, APC showed a very nice improvement in the overall responsiveness of my site; even Views content. I mention this not as an endorsement but as a possible benefit to the other users like myself searching for this topic: I'm on Dreamhost. Might be worth asking your current host if it's possible to install APC or similar opcode cache on your shared account.