What's Drupal

Drupal is one of the best content management system. It's a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using it to power scores of different web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. YOu can download it at http://drupal.org/download

Choose a Name for Your Drupal Site

First, you will need to select a domain for your Drupal web site, think about something that will make sense to your business and easy to be remembered. For more about what's domain, and how to find a best name for your Drupal site, please refer to Select the Best Domain Name

Drupal Hosting Needs

Just like looking for a web hosting solution for all the other type of web site, you will need to think about your needs on disk space, monthly transfer, and emailox, etc. And in below, we will discuss some key features are needed by a Drupal site.

1. Linux Platform with support for php, and MySQL or PostgreSQL. Drupal is an application developed by php, and run against MySQL or PostgreSQL. So, a support for php with database MySQL or PostgreSQL is the basic requirement for Drupal Hosting. And we would like to suggest a Linux web hosting package considering it is the perfect platform to run php and MySQL.
2. Easy to use Control Panel which will allow you to maintain Database, and conduct some routine maintenance tasks for your Drupal application
   • An easy to use to tool to create MySQL or PostgreSQL database and grant the access.
   • phpMyAdmin or phpPgAdmin to manipulate the data in the database, execute the backup or restore tasks to the data.
   • An editor to modify the Cron job of the system. There are many tasks need to run regularly. A permission to change the Cron file will be very helpful for the Drupal webmasters
   • Privilege to change the access permission of the file and directory.
3. Very fast connection speed to the database. Many web hosting providers haven't optimized the connection speed between web server and database server, which cause Drupal run very slowly. This feature you will only know after installing Drupal in their environment.
4. Reliable web hosting service provider with courteous and professional customer support. As an CMS web site, nothing can be more important than a stable environment.
5. Host multiple domain in one hosting account. One of the most attractive features of Drupal hosting is that you can install mutil-site in one Drupal instance, if your hosting doesn't support this feature, it's really very regretful for a Drupal developer. But this is not very necessary for a Drupal business site, since there is no business company want to host more than 1 site in their hosting account.

Best Drupal Hosting

Drupal has become more and more popular right now, a lot of webmasters choose it for their content management site. But finding an appropriate web hosting solution for Drupal is something hard since there are many hosting needs for Drupal you cannot find from the feature description of the web hosting soulution from the vendors, such as the reliability, connection speed between web server and database, etc. In order to help all webmaster finding the most appropriate solution, webhostingclue.com coworks with the top linux web hosting service providers to test their performance and usability against Drupal. And the top 3 solution are listed in Best Drupal Hosting.