I have never had good luck hosting my Drupal sites on shared hosting plans. My last venture into budget hosting was a disaster with the hosting company locking me out of my own account due to too many requests to the remote database. The truth is that I've only been happy with running my personal Drupal sites on virtual private servers (VPS). However, I'm having a difficult time justifying my yearly costs of using a VPS to host my sites.
The problem is that I'm finally realizing one of the goals I set for 2007, a resolution to reduce my workload outside of work. Specifically, I've spent the last year getting rid of most of my freelance work not related to my day job or CMS Report. So now that I have less sites to host it has become less cost effective to run my remaining Drupal sites on the VPS. With my yearly VPS contract up this month, I decided to give cheaper shared hosting another chance.
A couple weeks ago, I moved CMSReport.com over to AN Hosting. My choice of using AN Hosting for CMS Report is solely based on John Forsythe's recommendation that AN Hosting provides a reliable Drupal hosting service. CMS Report has only been on AN Hosting's plan for a couple weeks and so far the site seems to be running fine. I am a little concerned during peak traffic hours my Drupal site may be to much for this shared hosting plan, but I'm hopeful that everything will be fine. One of my posts last week attracted quite a bit of attention and yet everything appears to be running smoothly.
If I do run into problems with AN Hosting, I promise you this...John Forsythe will likely be the first person I talk to after I've recovered my site.
For my remaining Drupal sites, they have been moved over to shared hosting at GoDaddy. I've also moved a few Wordpress sites over to this same plan. My experience with GoDaddy's shared hosting plans for running non-Drupal sites such as Wordpress, Joomla!, osCommerce, and SMF have been positive. I'm hoping for low traffic sites that GoDaddy is now ready for Drupal. GoDaddy's shared hosting plans have improved greatly over the past couple years in terms of database privileges. Even better yet, GoDaddy now offers secure shell in their higher shared hosting plans.
So in a nutshell, besides using a VPS for your Drupal sites you might want to take another look at cheaper shared hosting plans. Or then again, you may want to just watch CMS Report and see if we crash and burn once more. I hope not...
This article first appeared on CMS Report.