Staying with budget hosting (at least for a little longer)

You may have not have been able to access CMS Report Friday evening and early Saturday morning.  That's because I've moved CMSReport.com over to a new shared hosting account with Dakota Hosting, a hosting provider I'm associated with via a reseller plan. The same host provider I've been using using all summer.

The fact that I'm still using a cheap hosting plan is a big surprise to me.  Why is that?  As you may recall, I had only planned to host my Drupal sites on a budget hosting plan for a few months.  After hosting my sites on a VPS for so long, I wanted to feel the aches and pains a Drupal newbie experiences when they find their site has performance issues due to an oversold shared hosting plan.  I wanted a learning experience and was prepared for the worse.

To be honest, I also was buying time until I came across better reseller plans to host my sites (Drupal and non-Drupal included).  However, looking at the various hosting plans provided by a number of providers was a frustrating experience for me.  I won't name names, but unfortunately there are a lot of hosting companies out there that do a very good job of hiding what features they do not provide under their plans.  I came across a couple sites that liked to cap your CPU usage to the point that half of my pages couldn't be delivered to users.  Or if they said they offered both PHP4 and PHP5, I found their PHP5 implementation to not be that straight forward or worse, the "how-to" undocumented.

Luckily three months can change the landscape of a shared hosting plan.  During all that time I was looking elsewhere, that cheap hosting plan I've been on continued to introduce features needed to be Drupal friendly (database features, cron, improved CPU, etc.).  About the only thing still missing on the cheap plan to meet all my needs is the ability to do a secure shell (telnet) session.  For the price, I can live with that.  Take that ...all you stingy hosting companies that didn't want me to run Drupal on your servers!

For the first time in the two years I've been running Drupal, I'm finally able to start recommending shared hosting for sites that utilize Drupal and other high-end content management systems.  Of course I still recommend a VPS or dedicated server for the busier Drupal sites.  However, for low to medium traffic sites it looks as if shared hosting plans from various companies are starting to become a viable option.

Is the point of this post to recommend Drupal users use the same shared hosting plan I'm running for my site?  Absolutely not.  I think there are a number of shared hosting companies that likely provide equal if not better service.  The point of my post is that shared hosting companies are finally starting to catch up in providing the features needed to run a modern day CMS such as Drupal.  You just have to keep looking and perhaps with time you won't have to travel any further than the server you're Website is already running on.