Hosting and starting a Drupal site the right way?

The answer to most of your questions is "it depends," but I have to point out that a dedicated server doesn't cost $200. Entry level is more like $75.

this question regularly triggers flame wars and accusations of bias (and indeed, shilling from the vendors themselves); so I haven't put links here to any of these companies! I have no financial interest in any of them. and I'm just one guy, with a couple handfuls of domain experiences over a number of years, so my experiences and value-judgments, positive or negative, may be entirely unrepresentative.

I think this is mostly comes down to your personal priorities.

• does your livelihood depend on the reliability and snappiness of this site, or is it really a hobby?
• what are your personal IT-guy skills like?
• how much time are you willing to put into learning and handling the skills you'll need to master?
• does geography come into play? (i.e. is your site's main traffic likely to be local, regional, national or global? the latency issue can be a factor in choosing where you are best advised to host out of.)

for myself, I have found that cheap deals are higher risk, and I'm more comfortable at the mid-/upper-bracket price ranges. even for sites where "not much is at stake".

Shared

some shared hosts do a lot better than others at providing your account with steady resources. be advised that service levels often change substantially over time.

quite apart from the parameters of disk storage, RAM ceilings, CPU availability, customer service accessibility & responsiveness etc., for a Drupal site in particular, it's very very helpful to have:

1. shell access [i.e. command-line capabilities, not just web and ftp interfaces]
2. the right to compile and use binaries, such as your own version of PHP
3. .htaccess control
4. also check out which Apache modules are available at the host. it sucks not to have mod_rewrite, for example

checking to find if each candidate offers these features is an extra increment on an already tedious process of picking from zillions of outfits; but they will at least help shorten the list of candidates!

the most consistent hosting outfit I have serious history with is Pair Networks in Pittsburgh, with whom I had about 10 years of utterly excellent, reliable service on a shared-host Webmaster account -- for about $30US/ month. They are pretty damn rock-solid, and incredibly transparent: they keep their entire 12-year incident history -- every single machine or network outage announced to customers in email (followed by another when the asset returns to service) visible on their website. they are now "100% green"; they buy offsets sufficient to make their data center have a net zero carbon dioxide footprint. their max PHP RAM allocation per account is just 16MB, which may not go very far with a technically ambitious Drupal site with heavy traffic levels. they have dedicated-box service too, but it's seriously expensive. and being way East Coast-ish, they carry at least an extra 40ms of latency for us out here on the West Coast. but: if I had to make one simple recommendation, it would be to try these guys out for a month or so. if your site works in their shared environment, then they are the ones I'd go with.

I've had mostly good results with DrupalValueHosting, on their higher end accounts, like "Enterprise Megahost". their shared accounts have a 128MB RAM ceiling, which works much better for my sites. they drive hard for 1-year+ signup cycles, however, so if you had a bad experience and came to bail out early in the year, you could find it quite painful (I don't know how they are at refunding the unused fraction of the pre-pay -- I've not tried). support is sometimes slow to respond, and I've learned to be very careful to write only short, simple trouble-tickets; however, they're always unbelievably cooperative and helpful, even taking the initiative to call me (from India) in order to get something tricky sorted out fast.

at similar mid-point pricing, I've had some experience with a Portland firm, ThinkHost; for some locally-focused sites, they were sort of appealing. (they were quite early to the zero-carbon-footprint "green energy" datacenter policy). their tech support crew were great, on the whole; but they were very very slow to provide PHP 5.x support, and that became a problem as CiviCRM updates began to require PHP5. they also can be almost impossible to get to quit billing your credit card; I still have a bad taste in my mouth about my own experience with them.

on the dirt-cheap end of shared hosting, I've had mostly good -- but periodically can be quite flaky -- service from Dreamhost in San Francisco. it's like $8/month for essentially (nominally) unlimited disk space, transfer bandwidth, and cpu; they also have a very reasonably-priced step up to VPS service, with easy migration. but when they have a problem, their response strategies (including customer communications) are so inartful, they come across as barely one step better than hobbyist tinkerers.

GoDaddy is a great place to buy domain names. it isn't a great place to host a website. I'd heard that, and wouldn't have ever tried them; but then I helped out a friend who'd gone ahead and bought a hosting package from them. I was quickly able to confirm the "street" verdict on them...

Virtual Private Servers

at the mid-point of the overall pricing and reliability spectrum, there are VPS services, which purport to guarantee some slice of cpu & RAM resources from within a very large box. my own experience with these is very limited. I have read however plenty of narratives online about spotty actual experiences people have had on VPS services.

Dedicated servers

these aren't necessarily as expensive as you seem to think.

I've seen "low-end" dedicated [and unmanaged] boxes going for no more than $75/ month.

A client and friend recently reached the breaking point with his small company's needs on a shared account. He decided to also upgrade his website at the same time, with Drupal replacing a great big hodgepodge of evil WordPress kluging. He ended up with a ServerBeach self-managed box; he spent more than the base amount though, with extra RAM and a dual-cpu box, etc. and he spent a bunch on hiring the expertise needed to set everything up on a naked 'Nix box from scratch, and to keep it reasonably secure.

If you have acquired the skills needed to manage and maintain your Open Source server operating system, web-server software, remote recurring backups, etc., then these can be a great deal.

If you're neither an experienced database administrator, and a skilled manager of Open Source server operating systems, you shouldn't underestimate just how long and how tedious teaching yourself the endless minutia can be.

at some point of growth and "strategic dependence" on a high-reliability service, a single dedicated box in a single location, just won't cut it; power supplies, disk drives, Ethernet cards, RAM, CPUs -- all are potential single points of failure; let alone how well isolated from disaster a single datacenter actually turns out to be.

right now, I have a hand in multiple sites on shared hosting and on dedicated hosting, and I monitor and can compare their response times on a web dashboard. there's a clear correlation (though not purely linear) between the amount spent on hosting, and the responsiveness of the site; both on average response times, and especially in variability. cheap hosts deliver wide standard deviations between their best and worst times.

hth,

Adrian
Adrian Russell-Falla

Well, you didn't clear it up for me really. I just won't spend more than $20-$30 a month for hosting a brand new web site. And I refuse to sign up with companies that don't give a damn about running Drupal. All hosting providers are almost offering the same things, and I am honestly tired of trying to figure out a way. You are not responsible for this, guys; don't think I am yelling at you. :)

I considered getting a VPS with GoDaddy for about $25 a month, but I am still doubtful about it.

Now I am looking at Bryght, as this is the only affordable, friendly, Drupal-oriented alternative I found. Pretty much everything else disappointed me in some way.

Hope I come to the right decision.

I would like suggest you to work with some reliable web hosting companies which can provide you shared web hosting, vps hosting, and dedicated web hosting. You can start with them from shared web hosting solution before attracting enough traffic to go with VPS hosting, and then upgrade to VPS when it's necessary.

The same strategy can apply to go with Dedicated hosting.

Best Drupal Hosting | Affordable Web Hosting | Drupal Tutorials

i' ve been using them and am very happy - upgraded to a container for other sites (40 a month) but for 20 you'll get all of the root access you need for drupal, rewrite, htaccess and solid performance with an easy upgrade path if you get busy (easy as in 'flip a switch and it's done' easy!)

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