Can drupal run successfully on shared hosting?

depends on how many modules you run. Drupal does indeed run on shared hosting though, It's not specifically targeted to ignore shared hosting however, if you pull a module buffet and throw anything and everything at yoru site from the downloads area you will likely run into issues.

I think it might be time to step up your game. If you are getting 5000 unique hits a day, you should have a way to make more than $5 a month for your hosting. Get creative and find a way to make a few extra $$$$$!

So far I have really liked ANHosting (affiliate link) you can just go to ANhosting.com if you like. However I have not tested it on a site your size. Definitely good on smaller sites!

As far as picking a CMS. I did a lot of research before choosing Drupal, and I am glad I made that decision over Joomla. It was obviously a bigger learning curve, but completely worth it.

Edited by silverwing - affiliate link removed

Be aware that many shared hosting packages limit you to a number of processes. Even though php code runs extremely fast - 5000 hits could put you over the top for your processes. It may be worth fidning a way of gauging how many processes are being ran at a given time (e.g. when your site is the busiest).

From Drupal caching, speed and performance:

For example, if the site is on a shared server, try "Boost" (static page caching for non-logged in visitors), complemented with "Authcache" -in CR's file or db mode- or "Advanced Cache" (for logged in members).

Another detail, it seems the PHP memory requirements are higher for Drupal 7 than for Drupal 6.

I don’t think that Joomla will necessarily need less CPU usage. Any CMS packing a large array of features is going to need a good share of resources to run such features.

3 things would help keep Drupal fast:

1. A good host. Even using shared hosting, some companies offer much better service than others. Go with a solid company and you’ll get much better mileage. I’ve run high-traffic Drupal sites using Hostgator without significant problems (although mostly anonymous users.)

2. Keep Drupal simple. The more bells and whistles, the more processing power required. Evaluate your needs, and if shared hosting is all you can afford, then keep your site shared-hosting friendly by reducing the amount of resource-intensive features.

3. Setup a decent cache. Although most cache options work best for anonymous traffic, there are some things you can do to reduce the processing needs by using advanced caching. You may not be able to get too creative under the restrictions of shared hosting, but at least cover your basics: enable Drupal caching for content and blocks, and research additional options that may fit your setup:

Caching: Modules that make Drupal scale
http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897

Also, you definitely want to go with the older versions of Drupal. Drupal 7 uses more resources than 6, and 6 uses more resources than 5. Drupal 6 is the current recommended version. Although I wouldn’t publicly recommend using D5 to build a site today, under your situation I may privately choose to run D5 for my forum - as long as there are plans to update the Drupal installation next year. Once D7 comes out, security patches will stop for D5.

http://2bits.com/articles/benchmarking-drupal-5x-vs-6x-which-one-faster....

Regards,

5000 unique visitors a day averages out to 3.5 unique visitors per minute. Any host, no matter how low-end, should be able to handle that very easily. And if you start to feel your website is choking on the number of users, check the performance-boosting modules that @joseonate mentioned above. VPS plans also start fairly cheap, about $20/month, so you don't even need to be monetizing your site very much to be able to afford it. But as @vizulefllry said, if you're handling a large site (and planning another large site) and all you can afford is a shared plan with Hostgator, you probably need to take a closer look at your business model than your choice of CMS.

Beware of premature optimization. It sounds like you're worrying more about "Can my server handle it?" (which in almost all cases, the answer will be yes; you may want to ask Hostgator for your site's CPU and memory usage logs to make sure you're not cutting it too close) than "Does Drupal have the functionality I need, and can I learn it within a reasonable amount of time?" Drupal has a tougher learning curve than Joomla, and it certainly took me longer to figure out how to make the modules fit together and such, but I prefer it that way. There is remarkable flexibility and functionality to be found with a combination of just a few modules. With Drupal 7, I expect that many common tasks will be included in core and you won't need to fiddle with contributed modules for those features.

If your site was bloated with lots of modules and add ons then you may hit the CPU limits quite quickly, but if you have built your site well and dont have too many CPU intensive features you should be OK.

Drupal caches very well, so have a look at modules like 'Boost' for caching the pages - this reduces CPU load and database queries massively, and means you can run more traffic intensive sites.

I run several Drupal sites on Hostgator and have always been very happy with them... but I havent had that much traffic. Also worth noting that with their Shared hosting you get more resources than some budget VPS systems, so it's worth reading into those figures

The thing to ask is 'what happens when I go above the limits set?!' Does the site get taken down straight away or do you get a few hours grace to sort the problem out? If your site was going to disappear during every traffic spike that would be no good...

It may however be worth looking into VPS - if its getting 5000 uniques a day you should be able to monetorize somehow. If you do go for VPS make sure you do your research - theres plenty of bad hosts out there who will give you lots of downtime and bad service. There's always reviews of different hosts on google.

Joe