If we're talking about hosting, I've been happy with a $9.95 shared host on Hostgator for a number of smaller installs and recently got myself one of their VPS offerings and have been very happy with the support and the performance. Looking at the price points I think you get a little bit more server than Linode but like Linode it's very hands on but you get ssh access so you can get everything you need using wget and yum.
Performance all depends upon how you're using Drupal. Drupal can be used for brochure type sites where the content doesn't change much, and there's not a lot of additional modules installed or custom developed.
Drupal can have numerous & custom modules installed, on a heavily used server, the bottle neck can be all that PHP code getting compiled. It's also possible Drupal is used for audio/video streaming, where network
bandwidth may be the bottleneck. If your Drupal site has a ton of dynamic content, lots of nodes getting created, etc, the database could
be a huge issue as well. What I'm getting to, it's very important to know how your site is being used, how Drupal is configured before jumping into what's best. Premature optimization is the root of all
evil. :)
Apache is the defacto standard when it comes to hosting Drupal. It's
developed on Apache, tested on Apache, and just about all general
hosting companies use the stock LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack that
comes with their choice of OS. There are other web servers too - lighttpd ( I base my hosting images using lighttpd ), and Nginx is another. Apache is pretty much guaranteed to work, lots of hosting
companies use it, but depending upon the type of hosting, performance tuning may not be allowed.
By developing a comprehensive site benchmarking process that mimics the way your Drupal site is used, you can make changes to the webserver, PHP environment, and/or MySQL database to see the impact on site
performance. Your site may reach a stage where you'll need separate web, database servers and require memcached, APC or using a content delivery
network.
Once you start playing with site performance, it's really a bunch of fun figuring it all out.
1 year 42 weeks ago
If we're talking about hosting, I've been happy with a $9.95 shared host on Hostgator for a number of smaller installs and recently got myself one of their VPS offerings and have been very happy with the support and the performance. Looking at the price points I think you get a little bit more server than Linode but like Linode it's very hands on but you get ssh access so you can get everything you need using wget and yum.
Hope this helps.
Cheers
Victor
I'm in the Drupal hosting business.
Performance all depends upon how you're using Drupal. Drupal can be used for brochure type sites where the content doesn't change much, and there's not a lot of additional modules installed or custom developed.
Drupal can have numerous & custom modules installed, on a heavily used server, the bottle neck can be all that PHP code getting compiled. It's also possible Drupal is used for audio/video streaming, where network
bandwidth may be the bottleneck. If your Drupal site has a ton of dynamic content, lots of nodes getting created, etc, the database could
be a huge issue as well. What I'm getting to, it's very important to know how your site is being used, how Drupal is configured before jumping into what's best. Premature optimization is the root of all
evil. :)
Apache is the defacto standard when it comes to hosting Drupal. It's
developed on Apache, tested on Apache, and just about all general
hosting companies use the stock LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) stack that
comes with their choice of OS. There are other web servers too - lighttpd ( I base my hosting images using lighttpd ), and Nginx is another. Apache is pretty much guaranteed to work, lots of hosting
companies use it, but depending upon the type of hosting, performance tuning may not be allowed.
By developing a comprehensive site benchmarking process that mimics the way your Drupal site is used, you can make changes to the webserver, PHP environment, and/or MySQL database to see the impact on site
performance. Your site may reach a stage where you'll need separate web, database servers and require memcached, APC or using a content delivery
network.
Once you start playing with site performance, it's really a bunch of fun figuring it all out.
~John
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