Blog category

5 min

Best Drupal Hosting: Comparison of Acquia Cloud, Platform sh, DigitalOcean, Amazee.io, and Pantheon hosting

It was hard to choose the CMS for your website. Now, you face an even harder decision - picking the best Drupal hosting. It is a choice you need to take seriously as it will have an immeasurable impact on your website’s future success. If you cooperate with a dedicated team of Drupal experts, it is very likely its members have already chosen Drupal hosting for you. No doubt this would make things much simpler for you. But at the same time, you’d have no information about the reasons for choosing that particular host. Your vision is limited, and it may cause various complications in the future. To help you out, we have made a detailed guide to some of the most popular Drupal web hosting providers. 6 Critical Points To Choose the Best Drupal Hosting For a tech-savvy person, it may seem like there is nothing complicated about choosing hosting that corresponds to Drupal requirements. Still, note that the hosting provider that was suitable for your WordPress website would hardly be the best hosting for Drupal solutions. Each software tool is unique; the CMSs are different as well. So, this decision requires some research and a special approach. At the same time, you cannot pick the simplest nor the cheapest option. You have chosen Drupal because of its great features. It would be a serious mistake to buy a $10 hosting package and expect high performance. Before starting an analysis of technical specifications, let’s take a look at several points that make a serious difference: 1. Requirements Usually, a Drupal website needs 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of total memory. Your website may grow in the future, but these numbers are OK to start. At the same time, you need to know how many visitors you expect to have on your website daily. Drupal serves anonymous users well, but for your business to develop, you need to allow user authorization as well. 2. Varnish Caching Support Did you know that almost half of all Internet users expect any web page to load within 2 seconds or less? Moreover, if a page loads for more than 3 seconds, 40% of users just close it. These stats are an important insight into user behavior. Even if your website is brilliant, users will simply leave just because the web pages take too much time to load. Although varnish caching works only for anonymous users, it is the key to speeding up a web page. So if your Drupal solution is huge and complex, you should find out which of the Drupal hosting options supports varnish caching. 3. Standard Development Workflow Creating complex IT solutions is not limited to using just one environment. If you or your employees have ever fixed critical bugs during the production stage, you probably understand what we mean. The website itself, new functionality development, and testing take place in three different environments, which is crucial. The best Drupal hosting must include 2-3 environments for seamless workflow: Development Environment The dev team uses this for development purposes. Staging Environment This is the place where testing, code review, and bug fixing take place. This environment is a sort of preview of your future website. Production Environment This is the public version of the website. The site administrator posts content and blog posts right here. This is what has to be impeccable. 4. Web Interface Convenience Without a doubt, quality software engineers will find their way through the most complicated and weird interfaces. However, it may take time and effort. So, in order to save time and money from hosting your Drupal website, analyze the interface suggested. Pick the host that allows you to modify the server configuration directly online. No hassle, new scripts needed, or performance losses – each action can be taken directly using the interface. Efficiency matters and this is how you can improve it. 5. Automated Daily Backups A backup is the fastest way to fix any issue. This is your plan B: if something goes wrong with the current version of your website, you can always go back to the previous one. If your hosting is not the cheapest, you deserve to have daily backups. Restoring backups should take up to 5 minutes. 6. Version Control Version control tools like Git track the previous versions of your website’s code. This is another, more technical backup you can go to. Git helps you understand which part of the code was changed, who made this change, and why. Also, it prevents any accidents, and if some of your team members accidentally deleted a significant module, you can always get it back. It is a common practice to separate hosts and version control vendors. However, if you have the chance to get both integrated into the same package, use it. 7. Costs A good hosting provider will not cost you $20 per month. Still, you need to decide how much you are ready to spend on this. The better you understand your budget restrictions, the easier it will be for you to find the most suitable hosting provider. Read also Why and how to use Aquia for Drupal websites