By john_b on

TMDHosting put a few posts on d.o. recently, so I went to look at their service. I have often posted that Drupal on shared hosting does not work, so I thought I should give them a chance.

The homepage http://tmdhosting.com/ offers Drupal specialist hosting at $3.85 per month inc. free domain. A very competitive price. (Don't take any notice of the countdown timer till end of Easter special offer: I signed up on time, but the timer started to run again from zero after it expired).

They offer free module install and free updates (which their homepage calls 'updates') on Drupal. I have not tried this service.

Even an install of Nodestream (a module-heavy Drupal distro) worked fast. I do not know whether that is because they are doing something right, or because there are only 8, low-traffic domains so far on this 8GB RAM server (96.127.139.58).

The homepage says the use lightspeed, but this appears not to apply to the Drupal server, which has Apache (IMO likely to be less trouble). It has php 5.2 (5.3 is recommended for D7 and some important contrib modules will not work on 5.2 e.g. http://drupal.org/project/notifications). By default 256MB RAM is allocated to php. It is a cPanel server running mysql 5.0 (why? cPanel does support 5.5).

Drush was not included, but after obtaining ssh access (for which you are supposed to submit a scan of a government-issued document) I ran a pear install of drush, which is really essentially for Drupal hosting, with no problems.

After a discussion which must have taken both sides hours, it was concluded that php is run as mod_php (without suexec) but that sites/default/files and tmp folders cannot be owned by Apache owner (because the account owner does not have sufficient permissions to do this). This means that Drupal only works if you set these folders to 777. The consequence is that anyone on the server, with almost no hacking skill, should be able to drop a nice js popup window on the site of anyone else on the server.

Summary: shared hosting which can run a large Drupal site fast, and has drush, and unlimited disk space, is almost impossible to find, so this service is a fantastic bargain. If you are the trusting type who leaves their house door open (I am!), and can live with your files and tmp folder being 777, and can live with php 5.2, I would recommend them, and at present will probably stay with them rather than take up their 30 day money-back offer..