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...

Earlier today, I officially canceled my reseller account for Dakota Hosting.  I started the account at the same time I started to build websites as a side business.  I finally decided to stop pushing the hosting business not because I was losing money, but because it wasn't personally rewarding.  I learned a lot about the business and decided Web hosting just isn't in my blood.  I will build a Website now and then for a friend or acquaintance, but to be honest my IT job during the day keeps me plenty busy.  I'd rather find some new challenges using my free-time for doing good instead of the sole goal to make money.

What I have found rewarding these past few years is blogging here at CMSReport.com.  I enjoy not only taking a look at the various content management systems in the market, but also getting to know the people behind the application.  I tend to be drawn more to the open source projects than the propriety content management systems due to some of the cool people behind those projects.  With business fast becoming dependent on the same social network model that their customers use, I can't imagine the propriety-only business model having as significant of a future as it once had in the past.

So, with one less "side business" to worry about, I hope to keep the promise I made to myself more than two years ago.

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.

Yesterday, I upgraded the PHP version on my server from 5.2.4 to 5.2.5. PHP 5.2.5 brings improved "stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related". I also reintroduced eAccelerator back onto the server. I stopped using eAccelerator last spring, not so much because I had any real issues with it, but because I spent the summer months hosting my sites on the cheap.

This time, when I compiled the new version of PHP 5.2 onto my server, I also made the decision to not load the latest version of PHP 4. Although most of the Web applications I run on the server are PHP 5 compatible, I've always made sure I also had access to a version of PHP 4. The time has finally come though where I really don't have a need or desire to host a content management system that is only PHP 4 compatible.

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!

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.

A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy".  In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE.  For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell).  So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan.  Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.

I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple.  I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec.  Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly.  While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there.  All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell.  Simple enough right?  In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ).  However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.

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.