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 Go Daddy, the Deluxe Plan. I've also moved a few Wordpress sites over to this same plan. My experience with Go Daddy'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 Go Daddy is now ready for Drupal. Go Daddy's shared hosting plans have improved greatly over the past couple years in terms of database privileges. Even better yet, Go Daddy 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...
Comments
JavaScript Aggregation
Hey, glad to hear you went with AN, hope it continues to work out for you. :)
One thing you might want to look into is enabling JavaScript aggregation (I mention this briefly in section 1 of my guide to surviving traffic spikes).
It looks like your site is loading about 10 different local .js files. You could significantly reduce your number of HTTP requests per visit by aggregating them into a single file. Not only will your site load faster, you'll reduce your CPU usage, too.
Retry on the JavaScript aggregation
Hi John,
I tried JavaScript aggregation in the early days of D6 (perhaps a beta or RC) and didn't have much luck with it at the time. I seem to recall having issues with JavaScript related to the RTE I might have been using at the time. I'm giving the aggregation another try.
Have you looked at caching?
Have you looked at caching? We are using Boost quite successfully so far. (Admittedly, it is a dedicated server and we are using Boost to extend what we are doing) but it does seem to help alot.
Cache Router has some good options too, but those may be harder to use on a shared host. However, I'm quite sure that Boost would work on a shared host and basically never bootstraps Drupal unless the page is not cached.
Boost
I have never used Boost. I've never really look at static page caching for Drupal mainly because the traffic of this site was never too much to tax the VPS (plus the MySQL database was local and not remote). This might be worth look at though if I run into problems with AN hosting (which I haven't so far) and/or other shared hosting plans.
Boost is great
I have been using Boost on a number of sites on shared hosting and it is fantastic. It makes a massive difference to page load speeds.
Go Daddy sucks for Drupal
Go Daddy sucks for Drupal sites, and in general. They don't offer SSH support, so you've got to upload and edit everything via FTP. Also, the only way to manage the database is via phpMySQL, and it's configured to only let you upload database dump files under 1MB uncompressed. Even for a shared hosting company, that's ridiculous.
Actually the Go Daddy you're
Actually the Go Daddy you're talking about no longer applies to their current offerings in their higher level shared hosting plans (Deluxe Plan or higher). As I mentioned above, the plans now support SSH. Also, phpMyAdmin allows you to import databases up to 1 GB (1024 MiB) though still uncompressed and I believe a 300 second upload time-limit.
A lot of the criticisms of Go Daddy (including many, many, and many of my own criticisms) are issues of the past and no longer applies today. Though when I'm asked, I still only endorse Go Daddy for low traffic sites. Go Daddy customer support is still bureaucratic via their multi-tier support making it very difficult for the customer to talk directly to their "real" IT experts.
ANHosting PHP Memory Limit
This comment is probably out of date since I see you've already gone for a VPS for your drupal sites (which I've just done) but I wanted to put a note in here to discourage any Drupal developers from going with ANHosting, for 1 reason and 1 reason only: their shared hosting has a PHP memory limit of 32MB. This will cause problems for all but the most basic drupal sites, and ANHosting are not flexible about it.
To be honest, this one single factor completely invalidates ANHosting's claim to be optimized for drupal, since as drupal has developed it has become more and more resource-intensive. Even a 64M limit on PHP memory will often cause errors when doing something as simple as uploading and processing a moderately-sized JPG.
CPU usage policy
In my case, I needed to leave ANHosting due to exceeding their CPU usage limits. I wrote about my experience and migration to a virtual private server server near the end of last year.. But you're right that for most modern Drupal sites, the 32 MB PHP memory limit is also too small
I do think though, it is important though for readers to be sure and to reevaluate shared hosting providers from time to time. A shared hosting provider that is stingy on the resources yesterday can change and improve their services ending up being a great hosting company today or tomorrow. I've also seen some great shared hosting companies lacking the agility to change with the times and become a poor host provider.