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Choosing the right Drupal host

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So you've spent countless hours trying to find the best system to use for your new website. Perhaps you happened upon Drupal while you were browsing around online. Now comes the even bigger problem of figuring out where to host the site. This guide will walk you through this decision, which while easier than you may think, does need to be made carefully.

Server requirements for Drupal
Drupal has very basic requirements. All you need is a server with at least PHP 4.3.5, MySQL 4.1 and Apache 1.3 or IIS 5. Drupal recommends, and I agree with, that you have PHP 5.2, MySQL 4.1 or higher and Apache 2.2 or IIS 7.

I personally recommend that you stay away from IIS, also known as Windows hosting, as a server because URL rewriting does not work nearly as well, and you may run into several other small issues. Support for the Apache web server is much better.

While you can run Drupal on a server with PHP4, it is no longer supported by the PHP project so is considered insecure. If you notice your server running PHP4 you will want to contact your host and ask about their plans to upgrade. In upcoming versions of Drupal they will be removing support for PHP4 as well, to introduce better functions to help the software run faster.

You will also want to be sure you're on a server with Apache 2.2. Both PHP and Apache agree that both run best when running PHP5 and Apache 2.2.

Who has these covered?
Most hosts will have the server software requirements covered. But the software is only one small part of what you need to look for. Your host should be running high-powered, enterprise-grade hardware. This includes at least 2 CPUs with 4 cores each (8 cores total), hard drives in RAID10 configuration and 8 GB of RAM. RAID10 hard drives offer not only the fastest speeds but the greatest redundancy in the case of hardware failure.

As important as the hardware is to make sure that the host isn't packing it full of customers to drive up their profits, while driving down the user experience. Look for hosts with no-overselling guarantees. A host with a no overselling guarantee can help assure a faster site for you.

Could my site be running faster?
It is branded to work with Joomla, but it works great with any site. After it runs you will want to scroll all the way down to the "Grades" section. The number you're interested in is the Generation Time. This explains how long it took to generate the HTML on your site. The number you want to see is .3-.5 seconds for most sites.

Other bonuses to look for
Some hosting companies have a lot of experience with Drupal and can offer extended support for it as a part of your hosting plan. If you are not a highly experienced user you want want to find a host like this.

The feature that most people forget about, until they need it, is a real backup system. And in hosting it's a matter of when you'll need it, not if.. Most hosts just setup cPanel to take a backup (most of the time just weekly, sometimes daily if you're lucky). From there most just leave the backup on the server. Using a control panel's default backup and keeping backups on the server is a disaster waiting to happen. And if you need to restore a single file on your site it can be like pulling teeth. Along with keeping backups in a remote datacenter, good hosts will offer what's known as continuous data protection (CDP) backups. CDP creates several backups of your site each day. You can restore your entire site, a single file, or anything in between. You can also choose from several different restore points for each file. If you need to restore a single file, you don't want to bother with asking your host to move your backup to your home directory, download the backup, extract the file, find the file you need and upload the file with FTP. If all you want to do is click a few buttons, CDP is for you.

So which company fits these?
A number of hosts touch on at least a few of the points above. Two of the more important things I've mentioned are the no overselling guarantee and the continuous data protection backups. Those are two of the harder things to find.

One company covering all of these requirements is BuyHTTP Internet Services. They have been offering Drupal hosting for several years. They run the high-powered servers, have the no-overselling guarantee and the continuous data protection backups.

Cloud Hosting – How Will it Affect You?

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Cloud hosting is a web hosting service that's derived from a group of servers which are all linked with each other to improve functions. These linked servers are what are referred to as a ‘cloud’ or ‘cluster’ and they allow any people on those servers to employ all the sources from all of the servers within the cloud.

Functions like processing speed, energy, memory, and difficult drives are all shared. These servers can be easily extra or eliminated and the greatest part is for your end users, is the fact that if 1 server goes down an alternate server might be utilized. Due to the fact Cloud hosting companies measure what are known as compute cycles, which can be measure of time it will take to method some thing, this enables for end users of the Cloud hosting to truly be billed for the resources they use and want as opposed to the standard web hosting billing techniques.

In addition to being ready to become billed for what they want, several users prefer utilizing Cloud hosting for different factors, several of which consist of:

•Scalability: This enables you to very quickly add or subtract the sources you want with out needing to move to a different server. This kind of flexibility offers you with a lot more management more than your investing and also permits for you personally to modify as you go along.

•Uptime: Typically with Cloud hosting you get a much better uptime than you do with the traditional web hosting solutions and this results in your web site being down less and ultimately will help keep dollars inside your pocket. Someday though Cloud hosting can encounter downtime if there's a difficulty within the network of servers and the servers are possessing difficulty communication with 1 an additional.

•Traffic increases: Sometimes you see exactly where a business that is profiled inside the news has their web site go down because their server couldn’t handle the massive spike in visitors volume. Whenever you use Cloud hosting this just isn't a problem because the added servers can basically take in the visitors spike.

•Technology integration: With Cloud hosting different technologies can be employed together that can’t be employed together with normal internet hosting. For example, with Cloud hosting it really is achievable to use .php and .asp files collectively as well as inside the identical folder since it may draw the technologies required from the cloud. This provides you greater versatility as well as the ability to use nearly any type of technology you want to and know that it will mesh with out a hitch.

•No hardware set up: Given that you are linked with a whole host of servers, as opposed to downloading hardware or software it is possible to just connect with a server that is within the cloud that has what you require.

Cloud hosting is comparatively new along with the track record is as a result anything but lengthy. The greatest grievance with cloud hosting is the fact that the lack of root indicates that there is going to be a lack of control. But nonetheless this type of technology is rapidly gaining recognition and may possibly just be the way in which that everyone inside the potential experiences web hosting.