Drupal Hosting - Notes from the November 2007 Meetup

This is intended as a stub wiki page, add to it as you'd like.
(I hope someone took better notes than I at last weeks meeting)

What we as a group value in a hosting provider:

• Consistency
  • Service Level Agreements (SLA)
  • Good documentation of escalation procedures
  • 24/7 priority support available
  • security is easily auditable
• Performance
• Uptime
• Shell Access
• Management tools (cPanel, etc).

(not all these tools are valued by everyone equally - it depends on how much system administration you prefer to do yourself)
(personal note: I don't put much stock in SLAs - they always seem to come with big exceptions, and mostly are a checkmark that is required by businesses, but don't actually reflect a companies track record or expertise in keeping your site up)

Hosting providers recommended at the meeting; which allow Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or Dedicated Server (DS).

• RimuHosting (VPS)
• Anarres worker co-operative (Toronto mass-Drupal hosting) - Derek Laventure's venture
• Rackspace (VPS)
• Rackforce (VPS, Canadian)

Simple Performance Tweaks

• Page caching - Very efficient if your site has a lot of anonymous users, part of Drupal core. Turn on under "performance" in admin settings. Most pages are stored in their entirety in the database, meaning displaying a page only requires a single database call for the content.
• Host Database on same server as website - Recommended for small to medium sites, *(VPS or DS likely necessary) - reduces network latency issues and one more thing to mysteriously go wrong/slow. Limits scalability, so large sites usually need a separate db server.
• OpCode cache for PHP - An opcode cache pre-compiles PHP and saves it in memory, reducing the amount of time to read/execute code. Particularly useful with Drupal because of its modular design (i.e., frequently accessed core code) - can reduce execution time by 90%. (Detailed Description by IBM)
  *(VPS or DS likely necessary as it requires a custom PHP install, not generally supported by traditional shared hosting)

An excellent introduction to this topic was written by Khalid Baheyeldin here:
http://2bits.com/articles/tips-on-speeding-up-your-drupal-sites.html
and
http://2bits.com/articles/tools-for-performance-tuning-and-optimization.html