Using Droptor to Monitor your Drupal Sites
Droptor is one of the easiest ways to monitor the health of your Drupal site. It's free for a single site, and only 2 bucks a month for each additional site you want to monitor.
You can use droptor on any shared host or VPS host, but configuring your site to perform all the optimization tasks suggested by Droptor may require higher level access than you can get on a shared host. As always, if you're concerned about acheiving top-notch Drupal performance and configurability be sure to look into VPS and Cloud Drupal Hosts for your site.
Troubleshooting Drupal white screens and errors
If you've developed many Drupal sites you've undoubtedly come across an unexpected "White Screen", a 500 error or a 404 error. Usually, these errors can be solved with a few tweaks to a server configuration that you, or your Drupal Hosting provider can quickly make.
A white screen typically occurs when your server doesn't have PHP error reporting turned on, so the actual underlying error isn't printed to your browser's screen. Instead, you only get a white / blank screen. If you are able to look at your server's error logs, you can usually find the underlying problem.
Why you want shell (SSH) access for Drupal
If you found this site because you're looking for a good, budget hosting provider for Drupal you may wonder why you'd want or need access to shell access (AKA terminal, command-line, SSH, or secure shell access). In all truth, you don't *need* shell access to install or manage a Drupal site, but shell access can help streamline Drupal installation and maintenance.
Installation
How to choose the right VPS
VPS hosting and Cloud hosting (aka cloud servers) are a really popular solution for Drupal sites and for good reason. However not all VPS platforms are created equal.
Choosing the right virtualization layer
Relaunching!
Stay tuned over the next couple weeks because I'll be adding user-rating and comments to the providers I have listed here as well as adding to this list of providers.
I have some more shared, VPS, and dedicated providers to write up over the next few weeks and will post them up as I have time. If you're not familiar with this site, please read the about page to learn what it's about.
Storm on Demand
I want to start off by saying that Storm on Demand is my hands-down favorite provider for managed Drupal VPS / managed Drupal Cloud servers. We (Rehab Creative) recently migrated *ALL* of our sites off of a previous unmanaged Dedicated server (this site included).
Update: I've created a site solely dedicated to an extensive Storm Review. Be sure to check it out as it has some performance benchmarks and more details about server setup.
GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks seemed like an interesting Drupal hosting option since they positioned themselves as an environmentally responsible web-host, which was the reason these guys initially attracted me. However, after looking into them a bit more I realized they run a really nice hosting operation. They're priced a bit more on the 'premium' side of the shared hosting spectrum, but you get a higher-end experience as a result. They cater to the CMS community, touting Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla on their site, and it feels like their servers are tuned to support Drupal really well.
Photon VPS
I was with Photon VPS for a couple years and only experienced good things with them. Their "Semi-managed" Xen VPS machines have very good performance, and you get "Semi-managed" for the price of unmanaged.
Their "Semi-managed" service level is outlined on their site, but essentially consists of some optional initial server configuraiton, security hardening and installation of any other hosting software you might need. However, if you need help configuring, or troubleshooting, you're on your own.
AN Hosting
These guys were bought by MidPhase a couple years back and offer essentially the same service and cPanel setup as MidPhase. We've never had a problem with AN Hosting and have several clients happily hosted with them. I really like their simple approach toward their hosting product.
They have one hosting offering, presented to the user as a daily cost of only 19 cents per day (That translates to $5.95 - $7.95 per month depending on the term you signup for).
BlueHost
Due to popular demand I've added this review of Bluehost for Drupal hosting. Bluehost is one of the bigger Drupal hosts around. They offer a tweaked / skinned version of cPanel that throws in some marketing stuff that they offer as add-ons to your hosting, but overall the skin is nice and integrated with the other parts of their system like support ticketing account management.
