By Hanscraft on
I've been with 1&1 for three years now after a recommendation from a friend. However, I have noticed that now they're so bogged down that I can't even auto-upgrade my WordPress installations or upload photos within the WordPress install. Drupal is even more of a heavy hitter than WordPress, so I know it's time to move to a more robust web host.
I don't have a lot of money so I'm forced to use shared hosting for the time being. What are your recommendations? BlueHost has excellent customer service but they throttle the hell out of even a small 3k visitors/month website.
Comments
This is the search result
This is the search result from HostUCan http://www.hostucan.com/search/plan?framework=Drupal%20Hosting&daily_vie..., from which you can find some alternative for Bluehost.
Yourself could also refine a search a little bit to find something might meet your requirement better.
Try Rochen
Have a look at Rochen!
http://www.rochenhost.com/drupal-hosting
They are Drupal association members, got great support, good prices and very quick optimised servers for Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla.
I've just moved a site to them and am very impressed.
4 Different Shared Host - still looking for the right company
I only started working with Drupal in November 2011 after watching training videos on Lynda.com. It is possible that my issues are self-induced.
I had existing HTML sites hosted on (http://www.hostcentric.com and http://www.startlogic.com) and they both offered SimpleScripts to install Drupal 7 so I did and both are VERY BAD, they offer NO Drupal support and the sites run so slow I cannot imagine a customer waiting to even see the sites. Very, very disappointed but that lead me to shop around because I really want to use Drupal. Both of these host offer good prices but are not worth the aggravation if you are running Drupal 7.
http://www.greengeeks.com EcoSite $148.20 3 years ($4.11 month). I might have gone wild with this site adding any module I wanted and trying to duplicate a html site that has about 6000 static pages. After about 6 months the site was giving me errors like ‘500 Internal Server Error -error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request’. I was told I needed to uninstall any modules that might be causing problems (I got rid of all of the commerce modules since I was never able to link to my cc processing company) and followed some recommended optimizations and I still received errors until Aug 30 when they did an upgraded (GREENGEEKS EMAIL MESSAGE: hardware upgrade is now complete and that your website is now running on a server with faster CPU, increased DDR3 memory and tons of further optimizations. This will increase performance and reliability, which is something we're always working hard to over-achieve.) Things seem better as far as errors but I’m having problems with display suite and the site seems slow. I have to say GreenGeeks so far has had the best Drupal support even making changes to the php.ini file for me.
When I kept having Internal Server Errors I opened a new account with http://www.inmotionhosting.com ProPlan $167 year ($13.91 month) right after installing Drupal 7 I attempted to install modules ctools and views only to get this error (The specified file temporary://filevAxVs5 could not be copied, because the destination directory is not properly configured. This may be caused by a problem with file or directory permissions. More information is available in the system log. http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/ctools-7.x-1.2.tar.gz could not be saved to temporary://update-cache-eda84aec/ctools-7.x-1.2.tar.gz. Unable to retrieve Drupal project from http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/ctools-7.x-1.2.tar.gz. ) I contacted tech support and it killed me to get this response: It appears that the directory path is in fact invalid. It appears you have it set to 'temporary://" as tmp folder. This is a 3rd-party related issue that is outside the scope of what support can provide. You may wish to consult with a developer. I asked for my money back because if they could not provide the same type of support as I had received with GreenGeeks I thought I better keep looking. After contacting sales for my money back they were able to correct the directory paths so I’m still using their site but have not asked tech support for any additional help – not sure my heart can take it!
Wow- the LONG and short of all of this is I am still looking for a GOOD host for Drupal 7 – the cost is a consideration however I cannot afford to have sites that don’t perform so I would pay more to get more.
9th node
I love 9th node networks myself. Great support, not the cheapest but cheaper than the big brands like GoDaddy
Thanks for the feedback!
What kind of site(s) do you have with them? There prices look good but I don't see where they mention being optimized for Drupal? I don't really know if that matters but the shared host I already use that don't mention Drupal don't seem to handle the sites very well. Based on the earlier post I opened a site with Rochen http://www.rochen.com last night.
rochen.com support update
I'm not impressed with rochen's support. I've had two errors (two different sites two different issues) that I was not sure how to fix and both times I received the following responce: Thank you for your ticket. We do not provide script related support. Please contact your web developer for further assistance, thank you. With all of the sites and hosting services I have (5 now) I have to say greengeeks.com is the ONLY one that fix errors. I would really like to continue to hear from others that have shared hosting accounts where they actually have DRUPAL support. Thanks!!
installed module now receiving fatal error
After installing url_alias I received an error that rochen.com sent me the message above that they don't provide script related support. Now I cannot access the site without getting this error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function uuid_schema_generate() in /home/weddings/public_html/sites/all/modules/url_alias/url_alias.install on line 40. I again asked rochen.com if they could help me access the site so I could remove the module and this is their response:
Hi Shannon,
Rochen does not provide development or script-specific support as Allen noted in his previous reply. We do not advertise development support services or have any developers on staff that could help you fix issues with your own script like that. If you have any issues with your hosting account itself though we could certainly assist, thank you.
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Adam Boswell
Rochen Limited
I hate that I've moved 5 sites to their servers now. I'm going to post in a different location to see if I can get help removing the module but I wanted to warn anyone that is considering Rochen.com they DO NOT support drupal!!!
hosting drupal sites is really a pain!
I have to say I LOVE the functionality of drupal but hosting drupal sites (at least on shared servers) it a real challenge (this is my nice word). After the issues I had with Rochen (see above) I was ready to only use Green Geeks but now months later when I start new sites on Green Geeks and an exact copy of the site on Rochen, the Rochen sites seem to work better. The biggest issue I keep getting with Green Geeks is Fatal Memory errors (Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted ), now their support seem to try an assist by telling me I can create a php.ini file and increase the memory limit but they don't know what directory to put it in? (can anyone help with that?) and I'm not sure what needs to be included in the php.ini file? So I tried to create one and put it in /www/sites/default but I continue to get the errors, so I either have the wrong directory or I have entered the wrong parameters in the file. If anyone has info for me I would really appreciate it.
I might just stop using Green Geeks, and stick with Rochen for awhile, because my sites on their servers don't seem to have these type of issues. I am still interested in others experiences with shared servers for Drupal. I'm also wondering if it is time to move up from shared servers but I'm not sure where to start.
VPS Node Box
I signed up recently with http://www.vpsnodebox.com/ and am most impressed with the service and customer support. The cPanel is clean and slick, easy to manage alongside all the site stats/system info. I have been in contact every day asking what I think are dumb questions but relevant still to my case, and, everytime a web expert is there to answer my questions.. politely with informative advice. So far the speed is what I wanted and the price is very affordable. I am using the Enterprise package.. Here are my options as viewed on the site (if you need screenshots of my cPanel, i can email them to you, just ask):
Xen Virtualization Platform
16 CPU Cores
40GB RAID-10 Disk Space
Unmetered Premium Bandwidth
Varnish Cache
Enterprise Level Managed DNS Service
CloudFlare Service
Unlimited CDN Bandwidth
256MB PHP Memory
256MB APC Cache
Unlimited MySQL Databases
Host Unlimited Domains
Host Unlimited Subdomains
Park Unlimited Domains
Unlimited POP3 / IMAP Mail Boxes
SSH Shell Access
ionCube Enabled
Softaculous Auto Installer
Free Server Migration
Offsite Backups
I added a Dedicated IP which you have an option to do.. and when i asked about size of my medium site I received this response (instead of trying to up-sell me they were honest!):
"We actually have this: http://www.vpsnodebox.com/shared-cloud-hosting
We have several clients running on it, it's fully managed, custom
control panel based on cPanel, free Enterprise DNS. We designed it for
Drupal, so it's very fast. These packages run inside giant
Xen 16GB VPS servers."
In terms of VPS: they offer Xen and KVM VPS servers, and everything seems very affordable. I simply posted this to compliment the awesome customer service because I came from both 1&1 and Bluehost... and while Bluehost was okay in terms of customer support, i get immediate responses with VPSnodebox and also, my site isn't slow like it was at Bluehost.
Dumb questions - Drupal support?
When you say you asked dumb questions - are they drupal related questions? I only have 1 year of drupal experience and I use existing modules and themes for everything, I have about 15 sites across 5 hosting companies). When the modules don't work, maybe because of the hosting setup or clash between modules I am at the mercy of the drupal support to get me back to where I started. Thanks for posting your information about the web host here and I would really love to hear more about their service and support.
I can recommend Arvix
I can recommend Arvix http://www.arvixe.com/ for shared hosting.
They may not be the cheapest, but they are reasonably priced, and what makes them stand out is the quality of their customer service and the speed of their servers.
Speed is the most important thing, and in the case of Arvix they have strict limits to the number of users who are sharing a server. When that number is reached, they use a new server. That's completely different to many shared hosting providers who have a set number of servers and cram as many users as possible on each server.
The fewer people sharing the shared server, the faster it is, and the better customer service you will get from the team looking after the server.
I am not an affiliate of Arvix and have no connection with them whatsoever other than being an extremely happy customer. Most of their customers are.
Before finally deciding on a shared hosting company, find a site that is on one of their shared servers (a customer of the hosting company, not the hosting companies own site, because the company itself probably has a dedicated server). Put the URL into http://whois.domaintools.com/, and on the resulting WHOIS record look at the entry for the number of "sites hosted on this server".
Some servers host hundreds of sites, some servers host millions!