When it comes to hosting a Drupal website, lot of people gets befuddled and confused about choosing a shared hosting provider. And so, if you’re going through such a dilemma then we’ll recommend you to read through this post to get a better understanding of Drupal shared hosting in detail.
Reading this post will help you learn about the reasons as to why you should use shared hosting for your Drupal site, some disadvantages that you’ll most likely encounter on running your site on shared hosting and more.
Reasons Behind Using Drupal Shared Hosting
There are two primary reasons because of which lot of Drupal users prefer using shared hosting. The first one is an economical advantage, and the second is ease of setup. You can easily setup a Drupal 7 website on shared hosting. In fact, any user having basic Drupal knowledge can set up their site on a shared host in just 10 to 15 minutes. But, today you can find several other hosting options available on the web – that are even more easy and quick at launching a Drupal website compared to a shared hosting.
And so, cost can be called the main reason as to why most Drupal developers choose shared hosting. For bloggers and SMBs shared hosting is the best alternative for hosting their Drupal site. However, you’re bound to run into some limitations.
Disadvantages of Shared Hosting
There are a few disadvantages to using a Drupal shared hosting plan, but these aren’t meant to deter you from using shared hosting. Rather, the purpose behind discussing the limitations of shared hosting is to make you aware of certain things that you should keep in your consideration – when you plan on hosting your Drupal website. Let us now discuss about the limitations of choosing Drupal Shared Hosting.
Performance. As opposed to dedicated servers, you’ll most likely run into problems using a shared hosting plan. For instance, there may be a few sites of your shared hosting server that runs on a single instance. This means that receiving huge traffic can slow down your site. And so, in case you’re expecting a huge traffic or even a moderate amount of traffic on your site, then shared hosting won’t be a good choice for you.
Memory Limits: Even after installing a few Drupal modules on your site, you might be compelled to cope up with PHP memory issues. Luckily, you can easily resolve the PHP memory issue, by either uninstalling the modules or simply expanding your PHP memory limit. Remember, you shouldn’t go for shared hosting in case you need to install a large number of Drupal modules.
Reliability: Another major concern of using the Drupal shared hosting plan is reliability. You may come across several reliability issues when hosting your Drupal website on a shared host than with other hosting options. And so, in case uptime is crucial to your Drupal site, you should avoid using a shared hosting plan.
Upgrading may be Difficult: Upgrading a Drupal site on a shared host can be a cumbersome process. So, if you don’t want to spend much of your time on upgrading the site, you can look for tools that helps in making the website upgrade process easier. Perform some research to check out whether you can carry out the upgrade process for your Drupal website easily or not – on your choice of shared hosting provider.
Shared Hosting is a Good Choice For Drupal
Even after all those limitations, Drupal shared hosting is a viable option. More than large-scale Drupal powered sites, you’ll see more small-scale Drupal websites searching for a hosting provider. If you’re a blogger or into a business that requires creating a simple website and are only expecting the least amount of traffic to come to your website, then shared hosting will be the best for you. Besides, shared hosting is also a good option for those who don’t like spending chunks of money in making the site up and running, and can bear slight reliability and performance problem at times. However, having installed hundreds of Drupal themes over the years, ThemeSnap.com also provides several shared and VPS Drupal hosting choices with long-standing records for our Drupal customers that would be great options with very little issues.
Conclusion
Just remember that the hosting process should be a fine balance of budget, time and mental freedom. But thinking that all this can only be achieved by spending more on your hosting is a viable solution is a wrong notion; you can also enjoy all those benefits with a shared hosting provider too. However, you’ll need to choose the right shared hosting provider that not just offer the cheapest Drupal hosting, but also provide you with peace of mind.
Fortunately, there are numerous shared hosting providers available online. But, make sure to evaluate your options first and then select the Drupal Module Development providers. BlueHost, GreenGeeks, GoDaddy etc. are some of the hosting companies you can rely upon for your Drupal shared hosting needs.
About the Author
As a web developer by profession and a writer by hobby, Edward Jones is currently working for OSSMedia Ltd.- A renowned web development services Company. Apart from working as a full-time Drupal theme programmer, Edward loves writing articles/blogs on WordPress, Magento, Drupal and Joomla development tips & tricks.