Over the last few years the Drupal project has been evolving its relationship with hosting companies and the hosting industry.

As part of our ongoing outreach efforts, the Drupal community is having a Drupal booth at Hostingcon, in Washington DC, on August 10-12th. Eric Mandel, from Blackmesh Hosting, is staffing the Drupal booth and doing a presentation about Drupal on the expo floor to the Hostingcon attendees. If you are in the DC area, the conference is running for 2 more days.

History of Drupal and Hosting Companies

A little over a year ago, most of the Drupal community's interactions with hosting companies evolved around complaints about service or complaints about hosting advertising spam on Drupal.org. The Drupal community started to evolve its relationship with hosting companies by giving them a place to be listed on Drupal.org. The Drupal Association contributed by making it relatively easy to be listed on http://drupal.org/hosting as detailed in this hosting directory and advertising policy page. The Drupal.org site maintainers also switched the hosting forums from hosting recommendations to hosting support forums and added three moderators, Tresler, VeryMisunderstood, and Silverwing with a new set of guidelines. Hosting companies felt like they had a legitimate way to advertise their services without having to resort in a cat and mouse game of spamming the hosting forums. This freed up the drupal.org site administrators to focus on more important issues.

Hosting Relationships Spread Drupal Usage

Another benefit of creating a list of hosting companies is that the Drupal Association now has contact information and a relationship with many of these companies. Those relationships are growing and have been helpful in obtaining event sponsorships and donated servers. One of our marketing efforts is to ask these hosting companies to have dedicated Drupal hosting landing pages on their site so that customers can more easily learn about what's possible with Drupal. This improves the visibility of the Drupal project among people who are signing up for hosting.

Hosting Relationships Help the Drupal Association

Another benefit of those relationships has been the creation of hosting advertising and affiliate programs. The Drupal Association has tried to keep the hosting advertising to a minimum, and only where ads are contextual, relevant, and useful. To date the Drupal Association has earned over $20,400 in affiliate sales from our hosting listings and hosting banners. More importantly the Association has had very few complaints about the hosting companies that are listed. The hosting affiliate sales program was developed by me (Kieran Lal, director of business development for the Drupal Association), along with the Drupal Association's Greg Knaddison. The hosting affiliate program is currently managed by Simon Hobbs and me, and I am also managing the advertising program along with Dean Myerson. If you would like to volunteer to help us manage these programs please contact us.

The Future of Drupal Hosting

In particular, the Drupal community wants to continue its relationships with hosting companies because there is a lot of innovation in hosting and hosted Drupal services. In the past, when the Drupal project was initially growing, we saw a lot of innovation and improvement from CivicSpace On Demand and Bryght. The next generation of innovative Drupal hosting services such as Acquia Hosting and Gardens, Buzzr, Development Seed's Feature Servers, Chapter Three's Project Mercury, and Webenabled.com's hosted development environments is currently underway. Some more traditional hosting companies have also been making it easier to host Drupal with one click installers.

The bottom line with Drupal is always making it easy for people to share their ideas, and increasing Drupal specific hosting options and improving hosting relationships helps more people do that.