As a person who is managing a site which is built on Drupal, you have to be very vigilant in decision making. Because the performance of your business website will be crucial for the satisfaction of your customers. Therefore maintaining a Drupal site is not easy as it seems.
Why you should choose Drupal?
Some of you won’t agree with me for Drupal as a framework while keeping WordPress as the number one CMS option. Let me explain.
Even though Drupal is not the simplest CMS to master, there are certain benefits within its complexity. As an example, Drupal has more customization options and flexibility than WordPress. And also it can tackle multiple users and complicated content structures within the Drupal environment. It may be somewhat difficult if you are naive. But, you can learn very easily.
If you are using Drupal you can be pretty sure that your content is optimized and ready to get traffic. That is because websites that run on Drupal are compliant with web standards. And also Drupal has a dedicated community with expert guides and lively forums that are ready to help you and you can exchange your ideas even. Just like the culture of open-source software.
Hosting your business with Drupal
First of all, if you are planning to run your website on an advanced platform like Drupal, you have to find a web host that can match the setup. Selecting the exact web host for your Drupal site is the most important thing. Given below are some Drupal platforms that are proven to give the best service for any type of business.
Nexcess
Being a part of the Liquid Web Family, Nexcess has introduced a variety of plans starting from $29/month. The best thing is Nexcess supports auto-scaling; you will be able to start from a lower plan then you can change as your business grows.
You can manage your site and server and view in-depth analytics from their client portal. Additionally, Nexcess offers some features like the ones that are given below, along with Drush for efficient management.
- Dev/Staging site including database scrubbing. ( You will be able to test everything without pushing to live site)
- 24/7/365 email and phone support
- If you accept the payment, they will help you to deal with PCI requirement
- If the things go wrong or stop, auto service restarts
- Development tools like Git, SFTP, Mercurial, Composter and SSH
And also Nexcess can provide you a free one-time migration. Regarding the enterprise hosting plans, they start from $1499.95 plus devoted servers with clustering. The following diagram shows the ordinary architecture.
There is a 30-day money-back guarantee for every plan!
A2 Hosting
This particular hosting gives you Drupal-approved support with 20* faster websites. A2 Hosting uses SwiftServers to provide supersonic website speed and superior performance.
They will offer you,
- Pre-installed, optimized Drupal software
- Free SSDs
- Server location as you prefer
- Free HackScan protection
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Anytime Money back guarantee
- Free account migration
Kamatera
As they claim, Kamatera allows you to create and host your sites with their super-fast servers within about 60 seconds. Drupal is amongst their offerings. From the number of CPUs to your preferred data center, you can customize each and every aspect via Kamatera.
The starting price will be $4/month. As Kamatera servers are globally available, you can select the host close to your audience.
Given below are the best features of Kamatera.
- Customizable pricing
- User-friendly management console
- Flexible storage adjustment
- 24/7 technical support via phone, email, or help ticket.
- Designated account manager
Pantheon
Pantheon company says they are the fastest web hosting service for Drupal websites. They also have a global Content Delivery Network that is guaranteed for faster site load times.
The best offers from Pantheon are,
- Managed Drupal hosting
- Nightly database and site backups
- Multiple environments for site development
- Automated updates
- Automated workflows
- The Pantheon basic plan is $29/month and the performance plan is $114/month.
SiteGround
SiteGround is very popular amongst the casual site owners and bloggers. But it also offers premium Drupal hosting for enterprise and large organizations. With the help of GrowBig and GoGeek hosting plans, they are capable to tackle the demands of hosting a high-traffic, user-heavy site.
The following are the Drupal-based hosting offers of SiteGround.
- Easy Drupal installation (Just one click away)
- Transfer an existing Drupal site without downtime
- Drush enabled
- Daily Backups
- Drupal expert assistance via chat, email and/helpdesk ticket
- Dynamic NGINX caching (only available on GrowBig and GoGeek plans)
Hostinger
Gives you a reasonably low cost, shared Drupal hosting with the same features as other expensive hosting providers. Currently, their hosting plans are on sale (up to 90% off). So you will be able to buy website hosting for $0.8 per month. The original price of single shared hosting will be $7.99 per month.
Another good thing is Hostinger provides Premium and Business hosting plans for both its shared hosting and cloud hosting services. Guaranteed site speed is 3 times faster in the Cloud hosting plan but quite expensive than Shared Hosting.
Both Cloud and Shared Hosting plans offer you the following features.
- Cloudflare integration
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Free domain for premium and business and all Cloud Hosting plans
- Speed is optimized to match with the Drupal framework
- Weekly and daily backups (premium and business plans)
- Drupal support by experts
- One-click Drupal installation
Acquia
Acquia is geared mainly towards businesses that want to scale or grow their sites with a trusted and established web host. Apart from hosting, Acquia provides development tools and enterprise-grade security for websites and even applications to perform adequately.
You will realize their dedication to site developers and business owners once you started working with them.
Basically Acquia has,
- Continued Drupal updates
- Uptime of 99.95%
- Powerful tools like Slack Metrics and Acquia Insights
- 24/7 technical support
- Global and industry standardized security
Summary
While building a business website, there are several factors to consider. Starting from speed to security and support to pricing. Before jumping into managing a business website, first, you have to be familiar with all the features of the hosting companies. Fortunately, all of the above offers managed hosting so you don’t have to worry about server management, server infrastructure, configuration, and software installation.
But if you are capable of setting the Drupal infrastructure by yourself and planning to do so, just read about cloud hosting platforms like Google Cloud, AWS, and DigitalOcean.