Posted by azollers on January 12, 2010 at 4:51pm
Hi Everyone --
I had a really great time at my first Drupal meetup last week and would like to try my hand at my first drupal site. Does anyone have any recommendations as to where I can get drupal hosting, or is there a drupal site similar to wordpress.com that lets you create a hosted page?
Thanks for your help and I look forward to the next meeting!
Alla
Comments
Here's the official list of
Here's the official list of Drupal hosts. I've personally used MXHub for years to the point that I have an affiliate link, and I've been very, very happy with the level of personal customer service they've given me, including getting backups, configuring permissions, and bumping memory requirements as needed. I think you can get a virtual shared host for about $30 a year and up, and this has been fine for my personal drupal site of a few hundred visitors a day.
If your site is going to have more extensive needs, it might be best to look elsewhere.
I've also heard really good things about Blue Host, but have never used them.
One word of caution: It's really really simple to use a lot of different web hosts' installation of
CPanelFantastico to install Drupal in a wordpress.com-style fashion, but these installations have been criticized for leaving tons of bugs, and I think it's worth the extra work to install it yourself.Hope that helps,
Michael
edit: changed to reflect ablewave's point that the problem is fantastico installations, which are a common feature of cpanel :)
Web guy, SpareChangeNews.net
Twitter: @morisy / @sparechangenews
Here are more Drupal Hosts
I run a web design and SEO company and offer hosting as well. If you're looking for inexpensive shared hosting, just go to: http://webshop.easystreetinteractive.com. It comes with CPanel. But if you're looking for performance, I have a company VPS that has dedicated CPU & memory and only a few sites on it. Go to my website to contact me for more information. http://www.easystreetinteractive.com
Brian Caruso, President
Easy Street Interactive, LLC
Bluehost
I have a few Drupal sites on Bluehost. They are a good host and have responsive support, we've only had a few short outages. I agree with Morisy, install Drupal yourself, don't use the Cpanel installer.
Hostgator
I have a bunch of sites at Hostgator, and their version of cPanel has a lot of drupal-friendly features. As others have said, stay away from Fantastico and do a manual install. You can use hostgator's cpanel file manager to upload and then unpack the tarball (great for installing modules too - just have to do them one at a time).
Their best feature is a php.ini EZ Config, which lets you tweak your memory and upload limit settings, among other things. It also easy to set up cron jobs and a number of other things that are common in Drupal. Lots of these things are things you might have to do via support tickets on other hosts.
They also are responsive on the phone and in chat. Highly recommended, especially for resellers.
Hot Drupal / Slice Host / the near future
Hot Drupal specializes in providing web hosting, specifically for Drupal Hosting. http://hotdrupal.com/. For shared hosting I think it's the only way to go unless you choose Slice Host but they require more technical expertise. There are a couple of SAS Drupal Service/hostings coming out soon that will be like Wordpress.com but not ready for primetime yet. Please get in touch with me if you need to find out more, I'm happy to advise.
Susan
www.macpheedesign.com
thank you!
Thank you all for all the great suggestions (sorry for not replying sooner)! I am really excited to jump into Drupal!
I am definitely going to try to install it from scratch, so that I can really get a handle on the system.
If anyone has any book recommendations on Drupal for beginners, would love to hear those suggestions as well! I know a few were mentioned at the meeting, but I forgot to write them down :)
Thanks again!
Alla
I've bought a few Drupal
I've bought a few Drupal books previously, but I highly recommend "Using Drupal" by the Lullabot team in terms of thinking Drupal-ish (they also have a good podcast) and figuring out a good way to configure the features you want for the long-term. It doesn't have a lot on design, if I remember correctly, but it can help you tap into some of the trickier features like calendars, photo albums, and more that are a HUGE pain to do correctly otherwise.
Web guy, SpareChangeNews.net
Twitter: @morisy / @sparechangenews
I'm a big fan of "Front End
I'm a big fan of "Front End Drupal" by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kaefer.
Read this unsolicited review by my friend @ultimike: http://drupaleasy.com/blogs/ultimike/2009/12/10-things-make-front-end-dr...
Ryan Price
DrupalEasy Podcast
Drupal books
I concur with the recommendations of morisy and liberatr.
As a first book, 'Using Drupal' I found to be very helpful for a tyro like me; 'Front End Drupal' would be a very good second book.
For my own reasons, I also liked 'Leveraging Drupal', but it may not be everyone's cup of tea. The author tried to be fairly comprehensive with a mixture of the pragmatic and the theoretical, plus many links to informative websites. http://www.amazon.com/Leveraging-Drupal-Getting-Right-Programmer/dp/0470...