Deciding On Cheap Drupal Hosting

Drupal is quickly becoming one of the biggest content management systems available today. It's extensive range of plugins and templates allows web masters to easily build and distribute powerful web applications.

Choosing a cheap Drupal host is a great choice for web masters who are trying Drupal for the first time, or who need to run a number of low traffic websites. Cheaper web hosting today tends to have good reliability, but disk space and bandwidth are often more restricted than with more professional hosting packages.

Choosing the best web hosting for your Drupal websites is an important choice to make from the beginning. Needing to change hosts once your web application has been deployed is a complex task. If your website is media rich 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 time. It is easy for something to break during the move to a different web host. If your web application is mission critical then your project will be impacted.

Factors to consider when choosing a web host include:

1. Price - For cheap Drupal hosting you want a good value package. US$5 per month is what you should expect to pay.
2. Disk Space - Is enough space provided to cope with your current website? Will it be enough for the growth of the web site? Expect to get unlimited storage, which in reality equates to 1,000 GB, gigabytes of files.
3. Unlimited domains - how many domain names does the web host allow per account? If you intend to host websites on the account you should get an deal with unlimited domain names.
4. Unlimited databases - if you have lots of domains will need lots of databases. bear in mind that many Drupal websites have multiple database per installation.
5. Traffic limit - If you intend your websites to grow in visitor numbers dramatically you should settle for an deal that allows unlimited bandwith. Costs can be high if you go over your permissible limit.

Drupal's multisite option allows you to run many websites from a single installation. This is particularly good if you intend to run multiple websites from a single hosting package. If you update a module or template in the installation all of the websites running on the installation will pick up the updated code. This makes the maintenance of the installation easier. Even the cheap hosting hosts allow the running of multiple websites from a single package.

All cheap Drupal hosting packages will configure their hosting on shared web servers. These shared servers run multiple 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 bad thing is that other peoples actions on the server can disrupt the performance of your account. As a guide you can comfortably run Drupal websites expecting 1,000 unique visitors per day. If your website receives more than this many readers, then you should consider dedicated or VPS hosting.

Find the best cheap Drupal host for your websites with my top 10. Darren Lambert is a web hosting professional, and web developer who has been using Drupal for five years.