Best Drupal Hosting 2021
Based on the IDC research, there are approximately 200,000 web hosts worldwide. It’s not hard to find a Linux-based shared web host that meets the minimum prerequisite of Drupal, but just like flowers need the appropriate environment to grow, Drupal works much better when it’s hosted with an optimized Drupal host.
We have come up with a list of top Drupal hosting, aiming to help customers choose the right Drupal web hosts among hundreds of companies. The ranking is mainly based on Drupal compatibly, ease-of-use, customer service, price, uptime, and hosting speed.
How we Assess Drupal Web Hosting
While almost all the Drupal hosting companies claim that they are totally Drupal-friendly, our top options are web hosts who surpass their competitors in the following aspects:
100% Drupal Compatibility
Drupal works on any web server that is capable of running PHP (which is the scripting language of Drupal) and MySQL database (which is recommended by Drupal core developers).
Therefore, to make the Drupal site properly operated, all of the top web hosts offer the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. Besides, while the minimum PHP memory requirement of Drupal installation is 16MB, the companies set their PHP memory_limit to 64MB or higher, accommodating the modules deployed by webmasters.
1-Click Drupal Installation
According to the Installation Guide presented on Drupal official site, we have found that installing Drupal manually is very complicated and requires a certain degree of IT competence, including the creation of a database, settings.php file, and cron job.
In order to help customers build their Drupal sites easily and effortlessly, all the listed web hosts offer powerful 1-click Drupal installation services. As there are lots of software which support the service, our top options utilize SimpleScripts, Softaculous, and Fantastico, which are more popular and user-friendly.
Customer Service
It is meaningless to emphasize the importance of customer service when deciding the right Drupal hosting company. After all, every webmaster is likely to encounter some technical problems, even for some veterans. However, the crux of the problem lies in the quality of services.
Being recommended and complimented by millions of customers, our top Drupal hosting companies offer responsive and impressive technical support. This includes Q &A forums, hundreds of Drupal articles & video tutorials, and a group of patient, knowledgeable support staff who are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via toll-free phone call, e-mail, and live chat.
Price Value
Some customers view price as the top priority before purchasing a Drupal hosting. In order to save budget, they may choose the extremely cheap one. However, these hosting solutions are often full of sucks and scams.
In fact, while taking price into account, we highly recommend customers going with web hosts that offer a good balance between cost and quality. The top Drupal hosting companies price their services ranging from $2.8/mo to $4.95/mo, along with a large number of useful features (unlimited space & bandwidth, user-friendly control panel, free advertising credits, and money-back guarantees etc). Therefore, customers can enjoy a powerful hosting solution without spending too much.
Drupal Site Performance
While ranking the top Drupal hosting, the uptime and page loading speed is very indispensable. After all, site visitors are likely to be disappointed by some websites with frequent breakdown and slowness. Our top options, however, guarantees customers 99.9% uptime and very fast hosting speed average less than 1 second, ensuring quality traffic even during the peak hour.
To help readers know better about those companies, our editors deliver the specific information of the first two recommendations as below, including InMotion Hosting, and BlueHost. Those hosting providers are the best Drupal hosting providers of all the 100+ web hosts which we have reviewed so far, and they are the most recommended Drupal web hosts listed at Drupal.org.
Their plans all include 100% Drupal hosting compatibility, free online marketing credits, guaranteed money back policy, and 24×7 US-based support with the promise –
“with holding times that average less than 30 seconds, it’s assured that the customers are helped with the expert who knows how to help”.
>> We receive a commission for recommended services. It does not affect the price you pay and helps us to run the website.
#1 Choice: InMotion Hosting Is the Best Drupal Hosting
https://www.inmotionhosting.com/InMotion Hosting is an accredited host 100% compatible with Drupal at Drupal.org. By leveraging cPanel & Softaculous, you can set up a Drupal site by 1 click with the best optimized configuration in the web hosting environment. InMotion Drupal hosting supports the following technical features:
- PHP 5.2.x/5.3.x, MySQL 5, PostgreSQL, Ruby on Rails & SSH.
- Apache2 modules including mod_zlib, mod_xml, mod_mysql, mod_rewrite, etc.
- Up to 512MB memory setting for PHP memory_limits
- Run PHP as suPHP for the increased Drupal hosting security.
- PHP FastCGI for Drupal hosting for up to 400% faster loading speed.
Loading Speed
As introduced, InMotion Hosting is the only web hosting company having 2 dedicated data centers with the topnotch servers, network and internet bandwidth in both East and West Coast invested over millions of USD. They also invest over a million of USD on the servers, network infrastructure and data centers yearly. Now all of their servers are 100% DELL branded with SSD drives, 4x Intel XEON CPUs, 32GB DDR3 RAM, RAID10 storage, 1000 Mbits internet connection.
InMotion Hosting is the fastest of all Drupal hosts that we had reviewed, up to 400% faster than many famous hosts in the industry. According to the performance testing of a Drupal site hosted with InMotion Hosting, A2Hosting, BlueHost and GoDaddy. InMotion Hosting is the best Drupal hosting in loading speed absolutely, approximately 33% faster than BlueHost and 231% faster than GoDaddy.
Reliability
InMotion Hosting is well-known for security and reliability. One of our editors, Kevin Small, has 2 personal blogs hosted with them since 2008 using Drupal. He had no downtime in the past 4 years and highly recommended this company in our office.
Since November 2012, based on our specific hosting uptime monitor, the InMotion Drupal hosting has been 100% uptime and zero page loading bottleneck. As a business class hosting service, this company really makes us amazing. To know more about it, please check out our Inmotion Hosting Review.
Technical Support
Currently, InMotion hosts approximately 30,000 Drupal websites. Their support staff are all well trained, even some are the veterans in the Drupal development community. They offer 24×7 100% US-based technical support via toll-free telephone, live chat and email. With hold times that average <= 30 seconds and 100% on-site staff, you can be assured that the staff helping your Drupal issues knows how to help.
Price
InMotion Drupal hosting plan is starting at $6.99/mo regularly. With the 90 days full money-back guarantee, your purchase is really risk-free and worry-free.
#2 Choice: Why BlueHost is also one of the Best Drupal Hosting
https://www.bluehost.com/BlueHost, founded in 1996 by the Linux kernel expert Matt Heaton, designed for personal and small businesses by a fast, reliable and secure shared web hosting plan with the world-class top-notch customer service. Nowadays, BlueHost has become the largest shared web hosting company in the marketplace and well accredited by its 2 million existing customers. BlueHost is still fast-growing, with approximately 20,000 new customers added for each month.
Besides our editors’ recommendation and the good accreditment by a large number of customers, BlueHost is actually one of the best web Drupal hosts recommended by Drupal.org. As the 491 BlueHost customers’ votes at this review page, up to 99.1% of reviews were positive with the web hosting service.
BlueHost is the ONLY web hosting company that has developed SimpleScripts for 1-Click Drupal installation and CPU Segregation Technology for reliable shared web hosting service.
SimpleScripts
If you’re an experienced Linux-based web hosting user, you may have known Fantastico or Softaculous script automated installer that is used for users to 1-Click install up to 100 applications in just a few seconds, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, OSCommerce, SMF, phpBB Forum, etc.
SimpleScripts, developed by BlueHost in 2010 that invested more than $200,000, which provides the better user-friendly installation UI and workflow than Fantastico and Softaculous. It allows users to 1-Click install up to 150 scripts that nearly included almost all the known applications. Even, compared to the generic script installer like Fantastico and Softaculous, SimpleScripts installs application in the optimized configuration match to the BlueHost hosting environment.
CPU Segregation Technology
BlueHost invested a million USD to customize Linux kernel in 2009 and eventually came out the CPU segregation technology that segregates the CPU, memory and disk I/O for every user in shared server and efficiently protect your server resources not been “stolen” by the bad neighbors. BlueHost servers will always respond quickly and users won’t be exposed to slowness due to sudden bursts of CPU, memory and disk I/O usage. Compared to other shared web hosts, BlueHost guarantees CPU, memory and disk I/O resources for every user on every server. In fact, this technology significantly improved the reliability for Drupal hosting.
To know more about Bluehost, please read our Bluehost review.
Why Is Drupal So Popular?
In fact, Drupal is one of the most widely used content management systems for the creation of websites and applications. At present, it has been utilized by at least 2.1% sites all over the world. Some of its famous users include NBC, BBC, the University of Oxford, Amnesty International and many more.
Here, to better explain how can Drupal be so popular among webmasters and developers, we have listed some benefits of this tool in the following.
Open Source Nature
Drupal is an open-source CMS. This means you have enough freedom to install it and modify the coding stuff without the need to worry about the licensing fees. Even great, Drupal is supported by a long list of Hoster, which means you could easily find a web host for Drupal, such as examples like Bisend Drupal Hosting, Bluehost, Inmotion Hosting and more.
A High Level of Flexibility and Simplicity
Drupal achieves a great balance between flexibility and simplicity by leveraging the modular approach for website creation and management. Especially, if you are going to set up an advanced online platform that needs the complex functions and features, Drupal is the best option as compared with any other CMSs.
Preferred by Developers
Unlike many other site builders that are acting as the prefabricated toy car, Drupal is totally different. You can regard it as a collection of axles, wheels, frames and many more, and create whatever you want if you have enough coding knowledge and experiences.
In this case, Drupal is highly recommended by those professional developers who are looking for something different.
Totally Safe and Worry-Free
Due to the open source nature, Drupal developers pay much attention to the resolutions of common security issues and vulnerabilities, such as the injections, session management, cross-site scripting and many more. All the default configurations and API of Drupal are developed to be secure.
In addition, to better safeguard the Drupal sites, you can also install some security-related Drupal modules.
Active Drupal Community
As Drupal requires some learning curves, there is a highly active community that has a large number of Drupal developers and users to address your issues.
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