Deciding On 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 websites.

Selecting a cheap Drupal host is a good idea for web masters who are trying Drupal for the first time, or who intend to run a collection of small traffic websites. Cheaper web hosting today tends to have good reliability, but disk space and bandwidth are generally more restricted than with more professional hosts.

Choosing the right web hosting for your Drupal websites is an important task from the start. Having to move hosts once your web application has been deployed is a time consuming task. If your website is media rich you will have lots of support files that need to be moved from the old web host to the new web host. This takes a lot of managing. It is easy for something to not work after the move to a new web server. If your web application earns revenue then your business will be effected.

Factors to consider when choosing a web host include:

1. Cost - For cheap Drupal hosting you want a good value package. US$5 each month is what you should expect to pay.
2. Disk Storage - Is enough storage 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 reality allows for 1,000 GB, gigabytes of files.
3. Number of domains - how many domain names does the web host allow per account? If you have lots of websites on the account you require an account with unlimited domain names.
4. Number of databases - if you have lots of domains will need lots of databases. Remember many Drupal applications have more than one database per website.
5. Traffic limit - If you hope your websites to grow in reader numbers substantially you should decide upon an account that provides unlimited bandwith. Costs are generally high if you exceed your allowed limit.

Drupal's multisite setup allows you to run multiple websites from a single code base. This is particularly good if you intend to run multiple websites from the single hosting account. If you update a plugin or template in the code base all of the websites 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 packages will configure their hosting on shared computers. These shared web servers run many accounts on a single computer. Your package will sit alongside other accounts on the server and share the resources. The good thing is that the price is kept low. The down side is that other peoples actions on the server can disrupt the performance of your websites. As a general rule you can comfortably run Drupal websites expecting 1,000 different visitors per day. If your website receives more than this many readers, then you should consider dedicated or VPS hosting.

Choose the best cheap Drupal host for your websites with my top ten. Darren Lambert is a hosting professional, and web developer who has been using Drupal for five years.