Finding Cheap Drupal Hosting

Drupal is fast becoming one of the most popular content management systems available today. It's extensive range of plugins and themes allows website developers to quickly build and deploy powerful web applications.

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 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 applications is an important choice to make from the beginning. Needing to move hosts after your web application has been deployed is a time consuming task. If your website is content rich you probably have lots of support files that need to be moved from the old web server to the new web server. This takes a lot of uploading. It is common for something to break during the move to a different server. If your Drupal site is mission critical then your business 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 considered cheap.
2. Disk Space - Is enough space provided to cope with your current Drupal system? Will it be enough for the growth of the web site? Expect to get unlimited storage, which in effect equates to 1,000 GB, gigabytes of storage.
3. Number of domains - how many domains does the web host allow on the account? If you have lots of websites on your account you require an deal with unlimited domains.
4. Number of databases - if you have many domains will need lots of databases. bear in mind that many Drupal applications have multiple database per installation.
5. Bandwith - If you intend your websites to grow in reader numbers dramatically you should choose an deal that gives unlimited bandwith. Costs are generally high if you go over your permissible limit.

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

All cheap Drupal hosting hosting companies will configure their hosting on shared web servers. These shared web servers run many accounts on a single computer. Your package will sit with other packages on the computer and share the resources. The plus side is that the price is kept low. The bad thing is that other peoples websites on the computer will affect the performance of your websites. As a guide you can happily run blogs with less than 1,000 unique visitors per day. If your website enjoys more than this many visitors, then you should consider dedicated or VPS hosting.

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