Drupal Hosting

Best Drupal Web Hosting

Your hosting package comes with Drupal 8 pre-installed. That means no more install headaches or fumbling around with install files. When a Drupal update is available, you can update the latest and best version with 1-click from your cPanel control panel.

While other shared Drupal hosts don't allow certain caching solutions on their servers, we encourage it! Our A2 Optimized Site Boost even features a one-click caching setup for an even faster hosting experience. A2 Optimized automatically detects your Drupal installs and allows you to setup Memcached and OPcache with a single click.

Your account is backed by our 99.9% Uptime Commitment so you know you can expect ultra-reliable hosting performance. Have Drupal Hosting questions? Our superb 24/7/365 Guru Crew support team is standing by and ready to help. Get started now completely risk free with our Anytime Money Back Guarantee!

Now Offering Drupal 8 Hosting

As the recommended service provider for Drupal, we understand the importance of staying up to date and supporting the latest versions of Drupal. Offering the most current version of Drupal is important not only for performance reasons, but also in keeping your site secure. That's why A2 Hosting offers Drupal 8 Hosting, meaning your account is fully Drupal 8 compatible. Drupal 8 comes pre-installed on your account when you sign up! With our exclusive A2 Optimized Drupal 8 setup, your site also comes pre-configured with the best security and speed settings taking the guesswork out of how to optimize your site!

What Is Drupal?

Whether you’re a blogger, growing business, or small mom and pop shop, Drupal offers a free, open-source hosting solution that allows you to organize, publish, and manage your digital content. With a versatile CMS that can be used for a wide variety of functions, Drupal has become a popular hosting and content management option for today’s growing businesses and web publishers.

Drupal is an open-source CMS platform that anyone can download and use for free. The CMS platform is made up of a core set of files standard with every installation as well as themes and plugins for customization capabilities. Originally written as a forum app, more and more people and businesses are choosing Drupal for their hosting and content management needs.

The Drupal Core

Drupal's main software release is called the Drupal Core. You'll find many features in the Drupal Core that you've become accustomed to seeing in other CMS solutions. Just some of these resources include user registration, menu administration, RSS feeds, taxonomy, customizable web page layouts and system administration. You'll discover that the Drupal Core has the ability to run a basic web site, single and multiple user blogs, a discussion forum and even a community site with content contributed from multiple author. Drupal is also easily extendible with over 16,000 available modules! You're bound to be able to customize it to your liking.

What's New In Drupal 8 Hosting?

The main improvement you'll discover in your Drupal 8 hosting account is a new and improved authoring system. Are you familiar with Drupal 7's distribution that was named Spark? Spark provided improved authoring system features and gave Drupal the ability to field test these features in live environments. It was ultimately decided that the Spark field tests were a success because it provided significant authoring improvements. That's why Spark has been being rolled into Drupal's core and the majority of Drupal 8's authoring improvements can be attributed to Spark. These improvements include:

• Responsive toolbar that works elegantly on your mobile devices
• Upload images straight from the Drupal 8 editor
• New and improved WYSIWYG solution
• Enhanced side-by-side column content editing view
• Intuitive editing of node and blocks

Why You Need Drupal Web Hosting

Drupal is often compared to Joomla!, WordPress and Concrete5, but each of these platforms have subtle differences that distinguish them from one another. Drupal’s strength lies in its robust architecture and scalability. 

As such, Drupal is best for websites expected to grow significantly in size or traffic volume, making it the CMS of choice for large media clients, brands, universities, and ecommerce stores. In fact, many government sites also utilize the Drupal framework. 

Drupal is also known for its high degree of flexibility, allowing companies to easily run a wide-range of scripts from a single Drupal installation. While it isn’t designed to support web apps like Joomla!, some Drupal users choose to install it and set it up to do just that. Sure, you could go with WordPress if you’re simply in need of a blogging platform, but it lacks the ability to scale like Drupal.

The Development and Growth of Drupal

As mentioned earlier, the Drupal host source code was originally intended as an application for internet forums. The open-source CMS platform was founded by Dries Buytaert, who now runs Acquia, a company of 300 people that specializes in providing Drupal support. It was this very company that helped transition the whitehouse.gov site to the incredibly scalable Drupal platform. 

Despite its humble beginnings, Drupal is now used by over two percent of websites across the globe. While open-source, it’s owned by the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization devoted to promoting the platform.

In terms of its use on the web, Drupal is made to support vast amounts of content. With Drupal, companies can index custom content types and display them in a multitude of ways, rather than being limited to the constraints of typical ecommerce and blog formats. This is why so many businesses are adopting Drupal for their hosting and content management needs over more traditional alternatives.

Advantages of Drupal Web Hosting

There are a number of reasons why many website owners choose Drupal over the alternatives, including:

• It’s offered as a free one-click install by many web hosts
• It’s actively updated and continues to become more usable for everyday web publishers
• It’s extremely flexible and designed to allow you to shape it to fit your needs
• It’s coded to perform fast, even with a large amount of content
• It’s very scalable and has been used for many high-profile sites, such as eBay and Harvard
• Its plugins, or “modules,” increase its functionality and versatility
• It features sophisticated user roles and permissions

With so many positives, choosing Drupal to power your website might seem like a no-brainer. However please keep in mind that PHP skills for complex functions are required when using Drupal.

Drupal Requirements

Buytaert designed Drupal to be an installation on the LAMP stack. At 15 MB, it takes up some space, and it requires additional disc space for content, themes, and modules. When installing Drupal, you must ensure your database and site files are on the same server. Although this isn’t a requirement, it will make a huge difference in your resource usage. Also keep in mind that Drupal comes pre-installed on your A2 Hosting account. If you decide you want to install multiple Drupal sites on your account, you can use Softaculous to install Drupal with just 1-click.

Drupal History

Drupal was created by software developers and University of Antwerp students Dries Buytaert and Han Snijder in 2000. It was originally created as an open source message board in 2001. The name Drupal is derived from the the Dutch world “druppel”, meaning “water droplet”. This was an ode to the website drop.org, whose code gradually turned into Drupal. In reality, Buytaert meant to name the project “dorp”, which is Duth for “village”. He felt this gave the project a strong community feel. However, he accidentally mistyped the name, but ultimately decided Drupal was a better name.

Drupal became popular thanks in part to the presidential campaign for Howard Dean in 2003. The presidential campaign launched DeanSpace using Drupal. This was a network of around 50 Howard Dean websites that communicated with one another and with the campaign.

Even though Dean's campaign eventually failed, shortly after, his web team decided to use Drupal to launch a political activist network called CivicSpace labs. This was the first organization with full-time employees who were developing and releasing Drupal-related solutions.

From 2007-2008, Drupal was downloaded over 1-million times. Even 10-years later in 2017, well over 1-million sites were powered by Drupal.

Making the Drupal Hosting Decision

Thanks to our exclusive Turbo Servers, we offer Drupal internet hosting up to 20 times faster than the competition, giving your site the boost it needs to grow and succeed. With us, Drupal comes pre-installed and optimized with elite features and performance settings, such as OPcache and Memcached. 

Needless to say, if you’re willing to overlook a few of the downsides of Drupal in order to harness its scalable powers, we’re the hosting provider for you. If Drupal isn’t the hosting solution you’ve been looking for, you’ll be happy to know we also offer several other industry-leading hosting services.