Selecting Cheap Drupal Hosting

Drupal is quickly becoming one of the best CMS' available today. It's plethora of modules and themes allows web designers to quickly develop and distribute powerful web applications.

Choosing a cheap Drupal host is a good choice for web masters who are evaluating Drupal for the first time, or who want to run a number of small visitor websites. Cheaper web hosting today tends to have good reliability, but disk space and bandwidth are often more restricted than with more costly hosting packages.

Choosing the best web hosting for your Drupal websites is an important task from the beginning. Needing to move hosts once your web application has been deployed is a complex task. If your website is feature heavy you will have lots of support files that need to be moved from the old host to the new host. This takes a lot of managing. It is not uncommon for something to break during the move to a new web host. If your Drupal site is mission critical then your business will be effected.

Factors to consider when deciding on a web package include:

1. Price - For cheap Drupal hosting you want a low price deal. US$5 per month is what you should expect to pay.
2. Disk Storage - Is enough space provided to cope with your current Drupal system? Does it be enough for the growth of the web site? Expect to get unlimited disk space, which in effect equates to 1,000 GB, gigabytes of files.
3. Quantity of domains - how many domain names does the package allow on the account? If you have lots of websites on your account you will need an package with unlimited domain names.
4. Quantity of databases - if you have lots of domains will need a similar amount of databases. Remember many Drupal applications have multiple database per website.
5. Traffic limit - If you expect your websites to grow in visitor numbers substantially you should select an package that provides unlimited bandwith. Costs can be high if you go over your permissible limit.

Drupal's multisite setup allows you to run more than one websites from a single code base. This is useful if you intend to run multiple websites from a single hosting account. If you update a plugin or template in the code base each of the Drupal sites running on the code base will pick up the update. This makes the maintenance of the code base less time consuming. Even the cheap hosting hosts allow you to run multiple websites from a single account.

All cheap Drupal hosting hosting companies will provide their hosting on shared servers. These shared web servers run many accounts on a single computer. Your account will sit alongside other accounts on the server and share the resources. The plus side is that the price is kept low. The down side is that other peoples actions on the server will affect the performance of your websites. As a guide you can comfortably run Drupal websites expecting 1,000 different visitors per day. If your website receives more than this many visitors, then you should consider dedicated or VPS hosting.

Compare the best cheap Drupal hosting for your website with my top ten. Darren Lambert is a Drupal expert, and web designer who has been using Drupal for five years.