New to drupal but am currently developing a few new web sites locally using Drupal 7 and Postgres 9.2 on Ubuntu Linux. Hopefully I will have these sites ready to be published in a few months so I need to start figuring out the hosting aspect. At least for the first year or so, traffic on both sites should be somewhat minimal (50-100 hits a day) so shared hosting environments is perfect. One site will be more informational with some user interaction while the other will be an e-commerce site.

Looking for some recommendations on multiple hosts so that I can compare. Also, any nuggets of knowledge about what to look for and how hosting works would be appreciated. Thanks!

Comments

2020media’s picture

Have a look at http://drupal.org/hosting

I would say your Postgres is likely to be the more limiting factor in your search and MySQL is more common amongst hosters.

jeffreyjhardy’s picture

Been in and around the software, CMS, and hosting industry for years, so here are my 2 cents worth of general rules that apply to everyone and every host:

Site performance - Make sure that your host retains you site in cache. They do not want to do this because, since cache is a limited resource, they want to share cache with as many sites as possible to maximize the number of sites that they can put on a single server. You, as the site creator/owner, do not care (really) about increasing their server density. If your site is in cache all the time it will be snappy at the user experience, which is what you want.

RAM - I have been around the horn on this many times. Different CMSs have different RAM utilization. Your host will want to share RAM as well, but during peak times when all sites are busy this is the chief reason that sites slow down ... get sluggish. They are sharing RAM with other sites during rush hour. make certain that your host allocates at least 200 MB of RAM per site on the server (careful for their use of tricky language here). This means that if a server has 100 sites on it, there should be 20 GB of RAM. This will be hard to find and you may have to pay a little extra for it--but what sense is there if you invest 200 hours in site dev and then cheap out on hosting for $5 per month? Pay a few dollars more and get the extra dedicated RAM.

BTW, these are my Drupal-specific recommendations (Other CMSs can be a little more or less here and there).

Let me know if this helps,