Sunday, July 10, 2011

Hosting Your Drupal Site With Shared Hosting

By Kelly Mellon


Currently Drupal is one of the best CMS(Content Management System) that can be found on the net. It's plethora of modules and templates allows web designers to rapidly build and deploy powerful websites.

Shared web hosting is a good choice for those who are new to Drupal and are still learning and testing their skills. Lately there are web hosts that are offering very cheap shared hosting. But the problem with shared hosting is that you will be very restricted with bandwidth, space and databases.

Before starting any site in Drupal be sure that you have found the best web host that will suite your needs. Having to change hosts once your web application has been deployed is a time consuming task. If your website is media rich you will have lots of support files that need to be moved from the old web host to the new web host. This is time consuming job. Very often after you have finished moving the files something will not work like it's suppose to be. If your website earns revenue then your business will be effected.

There are some factors you need to consider before going online:

1. Bandwidth - Maybe now your site is not having a lot of visitors, but you need to think for the future. Many in the future you will have many visitors viewing your site. Costs are generally high if you go over your allowed limit.

2. Cost - For cheap Drupal hosting you want a good value package. US$5 each month is considered cheap.

3. Limit of domains - how many domains does the package allow per account? If you plan to install more then one web site that you should get plan with unlimited number of domains.

4. number of databases - if you plan to install many sites you will need database for almost every site that you plan to install. Consider that every new Drupal site will need separate database.

5. Disk Space - How much space will you get with the plan that you will purchase. Maybe you site is small now but will time will grow and will need more space. Will it be enough for the future of the web site? Expect to get unlimited disk space, which in effect equals 1,000 GB, gigabytes of storage.

One of the best features with Drupal is that you can run many sites from just one Drupal installation. This is useful if you want to run several websites from a single hosting account. This way when you update one module or theme automatically is updated for all of your sites. This makes the maintenance of the installation less time consuming. Even the cheap hosting hosts allow you to run multiple websites from a single account.

All cheap Drupal hosting hosts will configure their hosting on shared computers. These shared servers run multiple accounts on a single computer. Your package will sit with other accounts on the server and share the resources. The good thing is that the price is kept low. The disadvantage is that the other peoples sites will disturb the performance of your site. As a general rule you can comfortably run Drupal websites expecting 1,000 unique visitors per day. If your Drupal website enjoys more than this many readers, then you should consider dedicated or VPS hosting.




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