Drupal Hosting Options
A bewildering array of services and hosting providers are available to host your Drupal site. Which should you choose?
In this post I will discuss the pros and cons of hosting your Drupal site on Pantheon, Rackspace Cloud, and a traditional hosting provider such as Hostgator with cPanel front end, which are three options we support at Sage Tree Solutions. Of course there are even more options available, but that's outside the scope of this article.
Pantheon is a cloud-based hosting solution developed specifically for Drupal. It combines simplicity in administration with best practices for very high Drupal performance and scalability and includes development and test servers alongside the production servers. A true one stop solution for most Drupal projects.
Price
At the time of this writing a standard Pantheon Drop - their terminology for a process space, which equates to a server elsewhere - costs $100 per month.
Pantheon Pros
In contrast to Pantheon, the Rackspace Cloud represents a completely unmanaged solution. You get a virtualized server in the Rackspace Cloud and are responsible for setting it up and maintaining it, a service we provide at Sagetree Solutions.
Price
At the time of this writing a Rackspace Cloud server with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB of disk, which is a good size for most small to medium size Drupal sites, costs $43.80 per month, and additional costs for bandwidth apply.
Rackspace Cloud Pros
Hostgator and many hosting providers like it represents the previous generation of hosting solutions. I.e. a tried and true setup, trusted provider and long track record. In addition, Hostgator VPS (virtual private server) instances have (optional) WHM and cPanel web interfaces to manage the server.
Price
At the time of this writing a Level 4 Hostgator VPS (virtual private server) with 1 GB RAM and 59 GB of memory, which is a good fit for medium size Drupal sites, costs $79.95 per month.
Which should you choose?
If you need a hands-off Drupal hosting solution with built in security and scaling potential, Pantheon is your best bet and probably also the lowest cost solution.
If you like to tinker with your site and server, you are in good hands in the Rackspace Cloud.
Likewise, if you work with a trusted service partner to monitor and manage your server (such as having a server and site management agreement with Sage Tree Solutions) the Rackspace Cloud represents a good solution with potential to grow with your business and ideas.