I was looking at Kristen's web site and saw her discussion of hosting providers. In looking into this topic myself, for every rave of a provider there seems to be a problem, too. Is it just that we want more performance than we can get for $5/mo. on shared hosting?
I've read developers say that you just can't expect to run Drupal on shared hosting. That seems a little strong to me -- I can run personal sites and small volunteer sites acceptably, but my experience with a module heavy enthusiasts' club website (www.vintagebmw.org) is that I did have to go to VPS to get consistent, satisfactory performance. (This was on GoDaddy; the cost for VPS worked out to $24/mo and the club seems happy with that.)
Is there a provider that can really support Drupal on shared hosting?
Comments
hot drupal is pretty great as
hot drupal is pretty great as a drupal shared host.
I have been using Hawk
I have been using Hawk Hosting (http://www.hawkhost.com/) for over a year and has done very well for a drupal only site. It no longers serves my purposes as I need to also run Java apps and more on the server so have gone to an Amazon Web Service. Amazon has a service that you can setup for free for one year if you setup according to their policy. I have just completed a writeup about at my site I moved to AWS which you can read at http://monkeyco.de if AWS interests you. I did make my setup more complicated than most will want to do, but I had a couple of ends in goal for when I was setting up.
Please note that the site is still a soft launch and not quite ready for prime time. I know of a Facebook registration issue that I need to find time to review and fix.
Just my $.02. Take with a grain of beach sand.
WebEnabled
WebEnabled (http://www.webenabled.com/)
Always had a good experience
Always had a good experience with Dreamhost - www.dreamhost.com
I noticed that web enabled is itself a drupal site
-- Julia v.
http://www.pfvdw.com
Other hosting
I've heard some people liking linode but one client is moving from linode to rackspace (I think mostly due to the system admins preference of the tools available).
I've heard good things about rackspace but that is not $5/month unless you host several sites on it. I'm considering doing that.
Cheers,
Kristen
Contact: https://www.hook42.com/contact
Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites: http://www.kristen.org/book
I'm not particularly unhappy
I'm not particularly unhappy with GoDaddy, but my experience with them is that there's a limit to their database performance that puts a relatively low ceiling on how heavy a website you can run on their shared hosting.
My personal site, and a bunch of "private" development sites I've done, have never had a problem. A Drupal 5 site I did for a volunteer group has never had a problem, either (www.ndsd.net). But the club site I did, with over 100 individual entries in the modules list and about 2000 (non-spider) pageviews a day seemed to be a bit on the other side of the line for them.
There don't seem to be any sort of benchmarks on hosting that can give one an idea of the performance a provider is selling, so they all look like a shot in the dark. Without some kind of performance numbers, there's but anecdotal talk -- like the last paragraph -- to describe what is on offer.
--Darryl Richman
http://darryl.crafty-fox.com
Hosting Research
I spend a good part of a week recently researching web hosting services and asking Drupal developers about their experiences. Here is a summary of some things I discovered . . .
Hosting companies are a lot like restaurants, 1) every person has a different experience as the wait service (like customer service) is provided by different people, and 2) the food can be good for quite a while then something shifts or things change and the food quality can suffer.
REVIEWS
I spoke with the owner of one hosting company directly and heard a confirmation through another person connected to another company . . . many of the hosting service rating sites on the web may not be ligit.
If you Google “best hosting” or “web host reviews” or anything of that flavor, you will find a number of sites which rate the different major web hosting companies. The truth is that some of these companies are involved with “paybacks” to the hosting services where they get up to 20 months of the fee for new referral sign ups. They troll the conferences that hosting companies attend for hardware & software to leverage their “high ranking” on the search engines as a storefront for new customers. (For those of you who enjoy conspiracy theories, I also heard that some of them might even be fronts for a particular hosting company – guess you can’t let the review sites just do you in.)
It’s amazing how much leverage you can apply if you know how to manipulate search to get to the top of the Google charts. Unfortunately, it kills the free flow of accurate information for making decisions (which I unfortunately discovered through first had experiences) as neutrality gets thrown out. So all those rankings should be taken with a grain of salt.
HARDWARE & NEIGHBORS
Another reason that some providers are great for some and not for others MIGHT be linked to hardware age. Some providers retire older equipment more quickly, but I'm guessing others hang on to it until it dies. That doesn't bode well for speed, even if the server is still reliable. So your friend may get on the newer faster server, while you end up on the one with the slow buss. The same is true for Shared Hosting - you're friend's server neighbors might be in the low usage category while you could end up on a server with an intermittent bandwidth hog that stays under the radar.
RECOMMENDS
Here are some of the providers people mentioned:
Servint.net (recommended by some, not recommended by others)
wiredtree.com (good words from a dev's client)
dreamhost.com (heard good but had a bad experience - they are not as hip on Drupal as people think)
icdsoft.com (good words from a non-Drupal customer)
linode.com (mentioned above, if you want to fly without a control panel)
rackspace.com (mentioned above)
slicehost.com (some recommend)
knownhost.com (some recommend)
hawkhost.com (high recommendations)
rochenhost.com (some recommend)
xenserv.com (some recommend)
asmallorange.com (some recommend)
hotdrupal.com (some recommend as fine for an average site but slow for a social media site)
And lastly, the one I'm going to try out for Shared Hosting . . .
ezp.net
They claim to be into fast and do several things to speed things up.
They use a combination of SSD (which I haven't seen mentioned by others) and HDD.
They use Litespeed - a drop in replacement for Apache - which is suppose to speed things up (and one dev I asked said he had no problems with it).
Their own site is powered by Drupal - that's a good sign.
And lastly . . . they answer the PHONE! Which means a lot to me as someone just wading a bit deeper into the Drupal pool. They are a smaller Canadian provider, but have been around a while. (Did you know they have different privacy laws up there?) They have one server on the West coast of Canada and one in the US on the East coast.
Their VPS hosting seems to start higher than others, but I haven't compared specs so you'd have to make some comparisons on your own there.
Talk to me in a few months and I'll let you know how they do.
Cheers,
Tom