Saturday, February 12, 2011

Drupal as your Web Host?

By Selena Welte


Drupal is a content management system which is becoming widely popular all round the world. It has large varieties of plugins and templates which help in development and distribution of powerful web applications easily.

For those webmasters who are testing this platform for the first time, or who need to run a collection of low visitor websites, it would be a great choice to select a cheap host. Though they come with more restrictions on disk space and bandwidth when compared to professional hosting packages, cheaper web hosting today tends to have good reliability.

The most important thing is to make the right choice of web hosting for your Drupal application. Once your web application has been fabricated, changing hosts becomes a time consuming task. A lot of support files have to be transferred from old to new server if your website is dependent on heavy media. This can be time consuming. While moving to a different web host, the chances of breaking increases voluminously. Your DP web site might be affected adversely especially if it is a money making website.

The factors which are important while deciding on a web page are:

1. Cost - You should go for a cheap Drupal hosting. A fee of US$5 each month is considered cheap.

Disk Space- Can your website cope up with the allotted storage space? Is it enough keeping in picture that your website growth? You should opt for getting unlimited storage which in reality equates to 1,000 GB of files.

Limit of Domains- What is the maximum limit of the package per account? A package with unlimited domain should always be preffered.

4. Limit of databases - it is better to have many domains with a similar amount of databases. Many websites that run in this platform have more than one database per installation.

5. Traffic limit - Unlimited traffic must be permitted if you want your websites to grow in reader numbers substantially. However, costs can soar high if you go over your allowed limit.

If you want to run many websites from a single code base, it's multisite option is well-suited for you. This comes in handy when you want to run several websites from a single hosting account. An update of a plug-in or theme in the code base automatically ensures each of the Drupal-powered sites running on that code base will pick up the update. Thus, maintenance of the code base becomes much easier and less time consuming. The running of multiple websites from a single account is permitted by even the cheap hosting packages, making them all the more attractive.

Every Drupal hosting host which are affordable will configure their hosting on shared servers. The shared web servers mentioned above enable running of multiple accounts on a single computer. Resource sharing is possible which enables your package to sit with other websites. The positive point is that this comes at a lower price range. However, people's action will have a direct impact on the performance of your account. Generally, Drupal supports the smooth running of blogs with less than 1,000 unique visitors per day. If you have more than the specified no of readers, then you should probably opt for dedicated or VPS hosting.




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