Glenn Lawson's Site

So you've spent countless hours trying to find the best system to use for your new site. Or maybe you were one of the fortunate ones who had a buddy that turned them on to Drupal. Now comes the even bigger problem of figuring out where to host the site. I hope this guide helps you to figure out what's important for you in picking your Drupal host.

Server software requirements for Drupal
Drupal has very basic requirements. All you need is a server with at least PHP 4.3.5, MySQL 4.1 and Apache 1.3 or IIS 5. Drupal recommends, and I agree with, that you have PHP 5.2, MySQL 4.1 or higher and Apache 2.2 or IIS 7.

I personally recommend that you stay away from IIS, also known as Windows hosting, as a server because URL rewriting does not work nearly as well, and you may run into several other small issues. Support for the Apache web server is much better.

While you can run Drupal on a server with PHP4, it is no longer supported by the PHP project so is considered insecure. A host running PHP4 likely does not take the security of thier servers very seriously, so you will want to ask them about their plans to upgrade or find a new host. In upcoming versions of Drupal they will be removing support for PHP4 as well, to introduce better functions to help the software run faster.

You will also want to be sure you're on a server with Apache 2.2. Both PHP and Apache agree that both run best when running PHP5 and Apache 2.2.

Who has these covered?
The majority of hosts will cover the server software requirements. The software, however, is but a very small portion of what needs to be covered. Your host should be running high-powered, enterprise-grade hardware. This includes at least 2 CPUs with 4 cores each (8 cores total), hard drives in RAID10 configuration and 8 GB of RAM. RAID10 hard drives offer not only the fastest speeds but the greatest redundancy in the case of hardware failure.

Many hosts who run this type of hardware still do a disservice to your site but overselling their servers. This causes your site to be slower than it should be. You can get around this by finding a host with a no overselling guarantee. Finding a host with a no overselling guarantee can greatly increase the probability that your site will run as quickly as it should.

How to tell if the server is as good as it could be
Although the site says Joomla performance grader it will work just fine with your Drupal site. When it's done running go to the 'Grades' section. The number you're interested in is the Generation Time. This explains how long it took to generate the HTML on your site. You want to shoot for a load time under 0.5 seconds.

Things you might not even realize exist
Some hosting companies have a lot of experience with Drupal and can offer extended support for it as a part of your hosting plan. If you are not a highly experienced user you want want to find a host like this.

The feature that most people forget about, until they need it, is a real backup system. And in hosting it's a matter of when you'll need it, not if.. Most hosts just setup cPanel to take a backup (most of the time just weekly, sometimes daily if you're lucky). From there most just leave the backup on the server. Using a control panel's default backup and keeping backups on the server is a disaster waiting to happen. And if you need to restore a single file on your site it can be like pulling teeth. You should be looking for a host that not only stores backups in a separate datacenter, but is using what's known as continuous data protection (CDP) backups. CDP creates several backups of your site each day. You can restore your entire site, a single file, or anything in between. You can also choose from several different restore points for each file. When you mess up your templates index.php file you don't want to have to download a week-old cPanel backup, extract it, find your file and upload it. Using CDP there is a web-based interface where all you need to do is click a few buttons and your files are restored.

So which company fits these?
Most hosts will get you part of the way. Two of the more important things I've mentioned are the no overselling guarantee and the continuous data protection backups. Those are two of the harder things to find.

One company that does have all of these points covered is BuyHTTP. They have been offering Drupal hosting for several years. BuyHTTP also offers the no overselling guarantee with the enterprise-grade servers.