Real Drupal Hosting Reviews From a Real Developer
I've been working with Drupal for nearly five years now, and I've tried quite a few web-hosts on the way. I run a web development shop specializing in Denver Drupal Development (Rehab Creative), and historically provided hosting for our clients. A couple years back we decided to get out of the hosting game, and needed to find some reliable hosts to recommend to our clients. This site is where we direct our own clients now. I have first-hand experience with all the hosts reviewed here, and I've used them to host real Drupal sites (not just "test" Drupal installs, but actual functioning websites).
Drupal Hosting Providers I've Personally Used
These are the hosts that I've had 1st hand experience with:
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Bluehost
Highly Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $5.95/mo
Admin Tool: cPanel
New Review! 6/12/2011
Due to some pretty strong nagging by visitors and clients who swear by Bluehost, we've added a review of Bluehost services for Drupal hosting. Bluehost is one of the biggest names in hosting, and we simply hadn't tried their services until now. Please read our full review for details on our experience with them so far.
Read Full Review » -
GreenGeeks
Highly Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE: $4.95/mo (3 yr term) $6.95/mo (2 yr term)
Admin Tool: cPanel
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. No nickel and diming, no upsells, no crippled cPanel, North-American based phone support. Fast, full-featured and guilt free.
This site is now hosted with GreenGeeks. (GreenGeeks is also the official host of Drupal for Dummies)
UPDATED - 6/12/2011 Read Full Review » -
MidPhase
Highly Recommended | Check'em Out »
PRICE:$5-8$2.95/mo (Starter Package)
Admin Tool: cPanel
Good balance of price and service. Great value, quick support turnarounds and clean cPanel (no junk / upsells in there). However, starter package is very limited.
UPDATED - 12/3/2010 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 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.
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JustHost
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.
NEW: Read Full Review »
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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 great ticket-based support, 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. One other thing worth mentioning, and it may have just been bad luck, but in under one year of service with them my server went down twice. This was reportedly due to their upstream power providers, but left me feeling a bit unsettled. Still, their response was very professional, and i still had an overall positive experience with them.
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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.
