Plenty of companies provide Drupal hosting services, but you need to choose one that gives you long-term success with better performance. Read on to discover:
- What is Drupal?
- Benefits of Drupal hosting over Generic hosting
- The top Drupal hosting provider
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What is Drupal?
Drupal is one of the oldest open source Content Management Framework (CMF) written in PHP and issued under General Public License (GPU). It was designed with the same purpose as any other CMFs — manage the creation and modification of digital content.
Developed back in 2000 to build small business websites, Drupal went through a lot of modifications to establish itself as a relevant CMF in 2021. Drupal now powers 3% of the sites that exist in the world and is on its Version 9 release.
Drupal is famous for its security service. Giant companies like Cisco and Verizon, including government bodies like Los Angeles and London Hall, rely on its security framework.
The present market is full of CMFs and content management systems (CMS), yet very few can handle heavy content, larger traffic and complex library resources quite like Drupal. But, Drupal relies on infrastructure to deliver its performance. And the most vital part of infrastructure is the quality and performance of the hosting space where your Drupal website sits.
Benefits of Drupal Hosting over Generic Hosting
Hosting services designed specifically for Drupal leave generic hosting far behind in benchmark performance. Here is why:
Security
Drupal hosting provided by reputable companies provides greater security risk tolerance. Their hosting structure is designed to secure your website from all external vulnerabilities. They patch the Drupal updates and backup your data regularly. Furthermore, their incident response policy can insure you from a disaster that would have otherwise been impossible with generic hosting.
Customization
Be it server configuration or multi-development environment setup for your site, Drupal hosting covers your endeavors from various angles. It offers server monitoring, performance optimization and workflow for continuous deployment.
All these essential features are rarely found in any generic hosting available in the market.
Easy Installation
Though Drupal configuration can be taxing, hosting your own should not. Most of the Drupal hosting plans offer 1-click installation. It means you won’t necessarily have to rely on your developers to update or install your website. Anyone in your team could do it within a few minutes with Drupal hosting.
Best Drupal Hosting Providers
Check out our list of Drupal hosting plan providers that we believe are top in the market.
1. Best for Free Development Environments: Pantheon
Pantheon has been labeled as the best Drupal hosting provider for both Drupal and WordPress. Scaling your website with Pantheon is easy and fast. It has an intuitive interface, which directly boosts the process of cloning and migrating your Drupal website.
Some of the key features that Pantheon Drupal hosting offers are real Drupal developers to support you 24/7, built-in staging environments, Solr, Global CDN and many more. Also, Drupal core updates are only a click away. It also provides you with a developer dashboard to keep track of your development in one place.
Pantheon is free until you decide to make your Drupal website live. The basic plan costs around $41 per month, which is mostly marketed for small businesses and low-traffic sites. It costs $160 per month for enterprise-level and offers premium features.
2. Best for Analytical Tools: Nexcess
Nexcess offers you auto-scale hosting per your website’s traffic and growth. It also provides you a tool called depth analytics, giving you a complete overview of your Drupal setup.
Nexcess also provides you with the staging or development server that gives you an environment to test everything before deploying to the server. Like others, it also offers 24/7 support on both phone and email. When things go wrong on your server, it automatically restarts the server. Nexcess offers built-in development tools like Git, Composter, SSH and more.
It’s a bit expensive compared to others — the entry plan starts at $12.67 per month but reaches $667 per month at the time of scaling to its Enterprise plan.
3. Best for Budget Plans: Siteground
Siteground is the most versatile hosting provider suitable for small and large website owners, but it is widely used to handle substantial traffic websites.
Drupal installation with this provider is just a click away. It also does daily backups. Its team has real Drupal developers to answer your queries 24/7 and migration experts to help with website transfer. There are also WordPress migrator plugins that make your migration automated and hassle-free.
For startups, its plan costs $6.99 per month, which is cheaper compared to its competitors. It also offers another plan called Grow big, which is marketed at $9.99 per month and offers you unlimited websites and an option to add collaborators.
4. Best for Enterprise Level Security: Acquia
Acquia is another big name in the Drupal hosting business. Acquia is used by some of the larger websites globally for its top-notch security and ability to handle larger traffic.
The key features of Acquia plans are its enterprise garage security and recovery service. Acquia’s infrastructure is designed for maximum protection from any vicious cyber attacks and 100% uptime. Its plans also have built-in Node.js support, which offers you an option to develop your server-side frontend apps and Drupal backend apps on the same hosting platform. The hosting plans come with a centralized dashboard for your multiple websites.
For a single instance cloud environment, its plan costs $134 per month. You can get a custom quote as per your need as well.
5. Best for Speed: Platform.sh
Platform.sh is another web hosting provider that gives you a premium web hosting service. Mostly, it is used for its speed and security purposes. It comes with a built-in composer, which makes your work even more comfortable.
CI/CD is also built-in along with Drupal console and Drush support. It also provides a multi-cloud hosting service with 24/7 global support. Other features that Platform.sh includes are Git API, managed CDN and SSDs.
You can get its service for free initially, but a professional package will cost you around $50 per month on renewal. The Enterprise package is costly, with a price tag of about $1,250 per month. This package is useful when you are expecting a considerable number of visitors to your website.
Try Before You Buy
If you are new to Drupal, we encourage you to start with providers offering free services. Get a feel of the service that you want to pay for and then decide. What hosting plans and providers you choose will shape your eCommerce experience as you go forward. But having a hosting plan doesn’t end things up.
For an eCommerce business to run successfully, you will also need business email and support centers, so look for solutions that sit seamlessly with your planned or existing infrastructure.
