I've been working with Drupal for some time now, and I've tried quite a few web-hosts on the way. My goal with this site is to present objective reviews for all the hosts I've had experience with. I have first-hand experience with all the hosts I review, and I've used them to host real Drupal sites (not just "test" Drupal installs, but actual functioning websites).
A list to start us off
These are the hosts that I've had 1st hand experience with:
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GreenGeeks
Top Pick! | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $6.95/mo
Admin Tool: cPanel
Full review coming soon, for now, here's a summary: These guys offset their carbon footprint by purchasing wind energy credits, enough to offset 300% of their consumption. Additionally, the server I'm on is a dual quad core (8 core total) machine with tons of features out of the box: cPanel, ssh access, service status, unlimited everything.
Price is higher than some, but it just feels like more of a premium hosting experience. No nickel and diming, no upsells, no crippled cPanel. Fast, full-featured and guilt free.
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JustHost
Highly Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $2.95/mo (w/coupon: 50OFF)
Admin Tool: cPanel
Cheapest cpanel host around. Performance ain't bad, can't speak to service yet.
(this site is hosted with justhost now)
NEW: Read Full Review »
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MidPhase
Highly Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE:$5-8$2.95/mo (Starter Package)
Admin Tool: cPanel
Good balance of price and service. Possibly intermittent performance, but quite fast when all is running properly.
NEW: Read Full Review »
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AN Hosting
Highly Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $5/mo
Admin Tool: cPanel
These guys were bought by MidPhase a while back, and as far as i know, are essentially rebadged MidPhase hosting.
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Crucial Paradigm
Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $6-25/mo
Admin Tool: cPanel (for shared hosting)
Servers seem uncrowded, great performance and service, but features:price ratio is a bit weak, and these guys don't really "specialize" in Drupal. Their overly-paranoid mod-security settings give views and other ajax functions some trouble unless you ask tech support to disable it.
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DrupalValueHosting
Stay Away | (I won't even link to these guys anymore.. please don't sign up with them)
PRICE: $10/mo
Admin Tool: cPanel
DVH is a new hosting provider. They started out really strong but have suffered some growing pains on the support side. Blazing fast and cheap, but poor support options. I have seven unanswered support tickets over 3 months old. I still have an account with them (even though i requested cancellation over 6 months ago !).
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1and1
Not Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $4-10/mo
Admin Tool: Proprietary, clunky (but, their vps uses Plesk)
Cheap. Good place to buy cheap domains. Shared hosting runs mySql on remote servers which usually = high latency, and slow load times for DB intensive apps like Drupal. Server software (PHP, apache) is often outdated. Also, their cheapest packages can't run Drupal's clean urls out of the box, don't give you ssh and php's multibyte extension isn't installed.
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MediaTemple
Not Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $20/mo
Admin Tool: Proprietary, sexy, mostly intuitive
I've tried the GridService, even with the add-on MySQL GridContainers (~30/month alltogether) and Drupal performance still sucks. Like 1and1, this is due to mySql DB being on a different physical box than your hosting. Faster than 1and1 shared hosting... but still far from 'fast': Proof that a sexy site and control panel do not = great hosting.
