Deciding on Cheap Drupal Hosting

Drupal is fast becoming one of the most popular CMS' available today.  It's extensive range of plugins and templates allows web designers to easily develop and distribute powerful web applications.

Selecting a cheap Drupal host is a great choice for web masters who are testing Drupal for the first time, or who need to run a collection of low visitor websites.  Cheaper web hosting today tends to have good reliability, but disk space and bandwidth are generally more restricted than with more professional hosting packages.

Choosing the right web hosting for your Drupal applications is an important choice to make from the start.  Needing to change hosts once your web application has been developed is a time consuming task.  If your website is media heavy you will have lots of support files that need to be moved from the old server to the new server.  This takes a lot of time.  It is easy for something to break during the move to a different  web host.  If your Drupal site makes money then your project will be effected.

Factors to consider when deciding on a web package include:

1. Cost - For cheap Drupal hosting you want a low price package.  US$5 each month is considered cheap.
2. Disk Space - Is enough storage provided to cope with your current website?  Does it be enough for the growth of the web site?  Expect to get unlimited storage, which in reality equates to 1,000 GB, gigabytes of files.
3. Limit of domains - how many domains does the package allow per account?  If you intend to host websites on your account you require an package with unlimited domains.
4. Limit of databases - if you have many domains will need a similar amount of databases.  Remember many Drupal websites have more than one database per installation.
5. Traffic limit - If you hope your websites to grow in reader numbers substantially you should select an package that allows unlimited traffic.  Costs can be high if you go over your allowed limit. 

Drupal's multisite option allows you to run many websites from a single code base.  This is useful if you want to run several websites from a single hosting account.  If you update a plugin or theme in the code base each of the Drupal sites running on the code base will pick up the update.  This makes the maintenance of the code base less time consuming.  Even the cheap hosting packages allow the running of multiple websites from a single account.

All cheap Drupal hosting hosts will configure their hosting on shared servers.  These shared web servers run many accounts on a single computer.  Your package will sit with other websites on the server and share the resources.  The plus side is that the price is kept low.  The down side is that other peoples actions on the server will impact the performance of your account.  As a general rule you can happily run blogs with less than 1,000 unique visitors per day.  If your website receives more than this many readers, then you should consider dedicated or VPS hosting.