We lasted nine months. That's right, for nine months we hosted our Drupal site with a shared hosting account. Last January, I knew we were taking a gamble but the monthly cost savings for hosting the site was just too tempting. In this end though, CMS Report was too busy and exceeded the shared hosting provider's CPU usage policy.

So, during the past few days I've been busy moving the site onto a a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server. This time, I'm going with GoDaddy but as far as self-managed VPS/VDS goes there are a lot of good companies you can go with. Although I can do Web server administration in my sleep, I think I'm going to miss having someone else doing the server management for me. I know there are better hosting options for professional Drupal sites but I don't think I'm in need for a high-end hosting plan for this amateur site of mine.

One of the common mistakes website owners make is not recognizing the growth of their site. We all try to do things as cheap as possible and often fail to recognize the increasing size of our content management system or the increasing popularity of our site. In the Fall of 2007 I made this mistake. The hosting provider locked access to my site and I spent a stressful week getting my database from the hosting company and placed onto a new server.

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...

Honestly, I'm not trying to put so much focus on Drupal when you consider CMSReport.com is a site that is supposed to put focus on at least 29 other content mangement systems.  It's just that there is so much coming out from the Drupal community that it is hard to ignore.  The latest is Victor Kane's experience with setting up a virtual private server (VPS) for the Drupal CMS.

Well, after realizing the limitations of shared hosting for Drupal development, I decided to go with the big boys and use a dedicated server or VPS solution, at least for development. So I can make a multisite install for the docs and I can make subdomains for each development site.

So after perusing various options, I decided for linode. After checking out the various plans, I decided on the Linode 300, and got 50% more disk space by paying for a year.

The good news for non-Drupal users, is that the VPS how-to can easily be applied to other CMS applications.  Check out the complete story.

Last weekend, both Linux Today and Linux.com provided links and excerpts to an article I posted here at CMS Report.  You can see some of the stats on my newly quantified site at quantcast.com.  While those managing large sites shouldn't be too impressed with those numbers, I'm personally pleased with the current level of traffic this little 'ol site of mine is seeing.  I'm not only "Wowed" with the number of people visiting my site to read the posts, but I'm also grateful for the opportunity to learn from those of you that leave some quality comments for all to consider.

More importantly, this past weekend's traffic bump was the first real test I had for CMSReport.com since it's been hosted on the new VPS.  I've done very little tweaking of the VPS, so I'm looking forward to seeing how much I'll be able to improve the server's performance once I find some free time.  Either way, it is very doubtful that CMSReport.com would have stayed up under the previous shared hosting plan.  The VPS gives me a lot of room for growth...oh yea!

If you are reading this post, then congratulations...you are now seeing CMS Report on its new server (a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server).  As I tweak the VPS in the following weeks, I may fall back on the old server from time to time but for the most part, I'm home.  Today officially ends my grand-experiment of running a moderately busy Drupal site on the cheap.

I made some big mistakes by not pulling CMSReport.com sooner from the shared hosting plan and back onto a VPS.  There are some very good lessons I learned this past week.  Once I catch up on my sleep, I plan on writing down my final experiences with running Drupal on a shared hosting plan.  I think when it's all said and done, it could be a good reference for those trying to determine whether Drupal is right for them but are prefering to stay with the lower-end shared hosting plans.  I'm also hoping to take the series of posts I've done on Drupal and Shared Hosting this summer and find some way to contribute them back into the Drupal Handbooks.  I know I'm not the first person that has wrestled with running Drupal on a shared hosting plan.  You can see John VanDyk's post as a recent example.

During the past couple years I have recommended to people that they host their Drupal sites on a virtual private server (VPS) instead of a shared hosting plan.   While a large number of people do not have problems running Drupal under shared hosting plans, I have always felt that there are less headaches with using a VPS to host your sites.  For example, with a VPS I don't have to worry whether the shared hosting plan gives me the necessary MySQL privileges needed by Drupal (especially CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES and LOCK TABLES).  From time to time, you also hear from people with "Drupal friendly" shared hosting plans eventually find that their hosting company isn't so friendly toward their Drupal site.  Planet Drupal contributor, Clancy Ratliff, is one of the most recent  examples for having a host provider not really happy she is using Drupal.  So I often ask myself, is shared hosting for Drupal really worth the trouble?

I don't know if shared hosting is worth the trouble but a chain of events have brought me to giving shared hosting another chance for my Drupal sites.  Last month, I pushed my VPS so close to the bleeding edge that it became unstable.  While I was able to get my sites back online, the downtime clearly told me it was time to move my sites to a new server.  While most visitors observed a performance improvement  for my Drupal sites since the server migration, it's only now that I'm letting the cat out of the bag.  For the past week, CMSReport.com has been under a shared hosting plan and not a VPS.   I'm currently running my site using a budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy.

I don't know how long I'll keep my site on a shared hosting plan but I am currently enjoying a break from the work, worry, and experimentation that comes with administration of a VPS.  While I may go back to a VPS, I thought it would benefit some newbies and other Drupal users my experiences and thoughts on migrating my sites from a VPS back to a shared hosting plan.

Those visiting CMS Report yesterday evening into this morning likely found that they couldn't reach the site.  My apologies!  I run CMS Report and a few of my own sites on a virtual private server.   Sometimes I just get an itch to go bleeding edge on the production server to get the adrenaline...so why not?  What harm could I really do to my Drupal and Wordpress sites?  Well...the hole I dug myself into was a little bit bigger to climb out then I had expected!  Worse, the only site I really had to restore from backup was CMS Report!

Well at least none of my actual clients were affected by my experimentation.  Plus you have to be impressed...I actually had backups ready to go.  Either way, you can expect the server to run a little slow today until I get a chance to tweak things a little more...

 

I'm in the middle of upgrading my VPS server from PHP 5.1.6 to PHP 5.2.1.  So if you don't hear from me anytime soon...you now have an explanation.

Actually, I'm not too worried about breaking the server.  I am however worried about breaking a few of the applications that may not be compatible with PHP 5.2.  Also, about half the time I recompile Apache through Cpanel on the server I find I also need to spend some time  also restoring eAccelerator.  The worry has nothing to do with whether I'm up to the challenge but more of a time issue.  I don't know what it is, but everything in my IT world seems to be hitting at once.   Anyway, here goes...

Updated: 1:35 PM CDT:  So far I haven't seen any conflicts between PHP 5.2.1 and the applications I'm running on the server.  I did have to raise the memory_limit in my php.ini and  make a new install of eAccelerator.  It cost me a little bit of lunch time, but that is about it.

Updated: 316 PM CDT:  Wow, all my sites on this server seem to be zipping along.  Perhaps the observed performance boost is due only to a reboot of the server, but I'd like to think that it has something to do performance improvements in PHP 5.2.1.  One additional change I also did was remove the Microsoft Frontpage Server extensions.  I haven't used Frontpage in years.

The following was submitted on our sister site, Like that Idea on December 28, 2005. It has been slighly modified to keep it up to date with the latest changes at Drupal.org.

We've decided to use Drupal for our content management system (CMS). An important question for newbies remains, how do we get Drupal onto a real Internet Website? You are probably aware that you need more than the "free server space" the Internet Service Provider is providing, but where do you start? Believe it or not, these basic questions have been asked by even some of the best people I know in information technology (IT). Many IT people may help run or manage the company Website, but someone else in the company left them in the dark to how the company got their Domain Name in the first place. If you're a small business, you may have computer people but what you don't have are thousands of dollars to throw at a Web server. How do people get their site on the Internet at a reasonable price, you ask? It's time to shine some light on these unanswered questions.

The simple answer is you just need to purchase an Internet name (actually called a Domain Name) and "rent" some space on an Internet Server through a shared hosting plan. So are companies providing theses Web services difficult to find? No, not at all and that is the problem. Typing in "domain name" or "web hosting" on your favorite search engine will give you so many companies to choose from that the task can be too overwhelming. Although we're interested in finding the right hosting company to run our CMS, Drupal, for any Website this is the minimum I would look for when deciding where to host your Internet Site: