Drupal Hosting

Do you have a Drupal hosting horror story? Did you get scammed by a fly-by-night company? Did your host disappear without a trace, or stop answering your emails?

Or maybe you've had a really good experience with a host? Did they answer all your questions, help you fix your file permissions, or point you in the direction of a really good how-to article? I've had good experiences with A2 Hosting. I've been using them since 2017 (over five years now).

The Best Drupal Hosting Solution

So, you're looking for Drupal hosting (or just hosting in general), and you don't want to get ripped off. You've probably already read a bunch of forum posts, hosting review sites, and top 10 lists. And you probably noticed most of them didn't seem very trustworthy.

Unfortunately, many of the reviews out there are fake, written by hosting company employees, either to brag about themselves, or to trash their competitors.

Fighting back against hosting review spam

With all the spam out there, it's hard to know who you can trust. My best advice is to do your research, and know who you're dealing with. With that in mind, allow me to introduce myself:

I started making websites for fun back in the 90s, and in 2006, I quit my job in Tech Support to become a full-time entrepreneur. Today, I make my living building websites and writing about it.

You might be familiar with some of my work. I'm the creator of DrupalPrincess.com, Drupal's largest independent showcase community site. I also run a small web design studio, crafting beautiful digital experiences. If you're not familiar with Drupal, it's a popular content management system WordPress.

It's all about database speed

Your web host directly affects your sites' speed. Faster Drupal sites rank higher in search engines, have better conversion rates and lower bounce rates. If you're running a modern, dynamic website, you need a server with fast database access. Every time a visitor loads a page on your site, your server has to make dozens of database requests. If your database is slow, your site will be, too. Like a lot of people, I learned this the hard way.

Back when I first started working on this site, I signed up with a web hosting company that claimed to be "dreamy". You've probably heard of them. It only took me a few minutes after installing Drupal to see that something wasn't right. Drupal was slow. Really slow. Pages took forever to load, or didn't load at all. Even getting into the admin section of the site took almost 10 seconds, when it should have been instant.

I installed some debugging tools, and narrowed it down to the database being really laggy and overloaded. A quick Google search showed I wasn't the only one having problems, and there didn't seem to be any way around it.

It's hard to get any work done when every click results in a long delay, so I cancelled the account and started looking for a new host.

After about a week of research, I finally settled on a company called A2 Hosting. Their Drupal hosting service has been recommended by Drupal for years! I signed up for an account, installed Drupal again, and wow, the difference was incredible.

Page loads went from over 3 seconds to under 0.2 seconds! It's shocking how much faster things run when you have a good database server.

Another thing I noticed right away was a big increase in download speed. My site is full photos, so fast downloads are really important to me. With my cable connection at home, I can download at over 1200KB/s from my site. That's the kind of experience I want my visitors to have.

Dealing with traffic spikes

If you've ever had your site land on Reddit or StumbleUpon, you know the real test of a host is whether they can handle sudden bursts of traffic. The last thing you want is a host that pulls the plug on your big day.

Just recently, one of my articles hit the front page of Reddit and Hacker News on the same day! A week later, the same article went viral on StumbleUpon. The traffic spikes were massive. Here's what it looked like in Google Analytics:
Drupal vs The Reddit Effect

At peak, my site was getting hundreds of requests a minute. Amazingly, the site didn't even slow down. One of the advantages of shared hosting is the massive amount of resources the servers have. You don't have to worry about running out of ram like you might with a low-end VPS.
Questions?

So, now you know why I like A2 Hosting so much. It's fast, it stays up, and it doesn't slow down. This is my fifth year with A2Hosting, and they're still the company I recommend to family and friends.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to help. Send me an email: hello@drupalprincess.com

Drupal Hosting FAQ

Here's a quick FAQ for anyone interested in using AN for Drupal hosting:

Do Clean URLs work with A2 Hosting?

Yes, there is full support for Clean URLs, and they work right out of the box with the default Drupal settings.

Does Drupal's multi-site feature work on A2 Hosting?

Yes, I've set it up and tested it myself, and it works well.

Does A2 Hosting support Drupal 9?

Yes, Drupal 9 runs great on A2. In fact, I recently ran some benchmarks against a popular cloud hosting provider, and A2 came out on top in terms of pure performance.

Does A2 Hosting offer shell access?

Yes, SSH is included. If you're like me, command-line access is a must-have feature.

Can I increase the PHP memory limit on A2 Hosting?

Yes, you can use a custom php.ini file to change memory limits as needed. I've set mine to 64M without any problems, and I've heard from others using 128M.

Are there any discounts available?

A2 has a deal on where you can save 25% if you sign up for 24 months. Monthly plans are also available, if you just need something short term. Get the fastest Drupal performance at A2 Hosting! Their 20X FASTER Turbo platform feature NVMe Drives for 3X FASTER read/write speeds and handles up to 9X more traffic.

Conclusions

Overall, I think A2 Hosting offers some of the best Drupal hosting around, especially if you're just starting out and don't want to deal with running your own server. A2 Hosting has a 30 day money back guarantee, so give it a try, and if you have any questions, let me know.