Drupal Hosting

People who are looking for the Drupal hosting for the first time will find this article exceptionally useful. However, more experienced Drupalers might also find it very helpful.

Drupal Hosting
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Sergej_Davidovic]Sergej Davidovic

People who are looking for the Drupal hosting for the first time will find this article exceptionally useful. However, more experienced Drupalers might also find it very helpful. The article is structured into following sections:

Introduction

Web Hosting Types

Drupal Hosting Requirements

Estimating Your Drupal Hosting Needs

Web Hosting Type Selection

Web Hosting Provider Selection

Web Hosting Package Selection

Conclusion

Web Hosting Types
There are several web hosting types:

shared web hosting – several web sites are hosted on one server computer, sharing resources like processor, RAM, bandwidth and running single operating system. The most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance

virtual private server (VPS), also called virtual dedicated server(VDS) - one physical server computer is partitioned into multiple servers where each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted. VPS is more flexible and powerful than shared hosting, for more demanding purposes

dedicated server - the client leases entire server not shared with anyone. The most flexible and powerful web hosting service

others – off-topic (server collocation, clustered hosting ...)

Drupal Hosting Requirements
For running Drupal it is necessary to have a Web Server that can execute PHP scripts. Recommended is Apache, but Microsoft's IIS is adequate as well. Furthermore, you will need PHP and PHP-supported Database Server, like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Web Hosting Type Selection
If you plan to host less demanding Drupal site, it is probably best to choose the least expensive, shared hosting. On the other hand, if you plan to run an advanced Drupal site, or Drupal site with significant traffic, you could choose VPS or even dedicated server.
Transition from smaller web hosting package to bigger one, on the same hosting type and provider, is straight forward and easy. Therefore you could plan your needs for the longer period, because transition from one hosting type to another is more complex.

Web Hosting Provider Selection
After estimating your needs and selecting the most appropriate hosting type, the next step is to decide about web hosting provider.
On the market, there are plenty of low cost or even free web hosting service providers, but you should avoid them due to lack of quality of service. For small difference in your budget, you can choose more reliable web hosting, with much better uptime, technical support and less headaches.
Hosting providers usually offer one or more hosting types and several hosting packages within each hosting type, differing in storage, bandwidth, supported features etc.

Web Hosting Package Selection
You could choose your Drupal web hosting package to fulfill both your needs, today and tomorrow. But even better, you could consider to take smaller web hosting package, with an option to expand it to bigger package in the future, as your needs are growing.
For people running or plan to run multiple sites, it could be interesting to consider reseller hosting packages. This kind of hosting package offers to split your hosting package in smaller pieces, which you can use independently, with their own domain names, disk space... You could even resell them to others (this can also be interesting for web designers, to resell hosting packages to their clients).

Conclusion
For beginners, in most cases the shared hosting will be quite enough. But do not fall into the lure, and take some of the cheapest shared hosting packages, with lot of disk space, but with lack of features and/or reliability and with poor technical support. Your startup web page, probably wouldn't need 500 GB of the disk space. Instead, you will want your web page is a rather fast-loading. Also, when something goes wrong, the most important is to restore the web site in shortest term, and then the good technical support could be crucial.
As long as whole shared host server is not full loaded, the performance can be quite enough for you. But, when this change, and not only due to your increased traffic, but also due to total server load, your site may become hardly available.
This implies that the main decision about hosting type depends on how much your site is important to you. Can you afford to be temporary unavailable or not? If the answer is yes, then the shared hosting is the right solution for you. Otherwise, consider VPS or dedicated server. The main advantage of VPS and dedicated server hosting compared with shared hosting is the guaranteed performance.

This article is licensed under the [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/]Creative Commons (Attribution-NoDerivs: 3.0) License

As a member of ThemeGarden team, experienced in Drupal CMS, I hope this article will be helpful for those looking for Drupal hosting. On [http://drupal.org/requirements]drupal.org/requirements you can find detailed Drupal requirements, and here are some web hostings where you can check more details on hosting packages and pricing: [http://themegarden.org/drupal50/?q=drupal-hosting#hostings]Web Hosting Providers.

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