Drupal 7 Hosting: Top Hosts

Today is the best day to sign up for your drupal 7 hosting. The prices have never been lower for our leading hosting sources. Today's deal is not going to last long though, so you better act as soon as possible.

Drupal 7 has arrived on the scene and has taken over the hearts of many web developers looking for a qualitly content management system, easily customizable, and has plenty of user support for new add-ons and suggestions for accomplishing web development tasks easy to large. However, with a great new system comes a need for great hosting to support the ever expending list of requirements. Drupal 7 has no shortage of its list of requirements.

Our reason for being here is quite simple. We are drupal 7 fans and have tested a variety of hosting systems to support our growing number of drupal 7 websites. But quality hosting is hard to find. In addition, it is simply hard to find quality hosting that is consistently providing service that meets the high level of expectations of any hosting company. We simply have gone through so many poor hosting solutions that do not meet the drupal 7 hosting requirements or simply offer poor service that we decided to share our recommendation to you.

As of now, we not longer recommend signing up for AN Hosting but instead have found that A2 Hosting is better and cheaper per month. 

See For Yourself Now!

Read on to see why we switched from AN Hosting to A2Hosting

Two months ago, we launched this site to give users a specific location to find the best Drupal hosting out there. In particular, for those looking to host their newly developed drupal 7 websites, there had not been a lot of proven and tested hosting services. Two months have passed and I have to say one thing, AN Hosting (which was our original drupal 7 hosting of choice) is not worth the money to use their service.

AN Hosting is not what we Expected, Even for $5

Yes, we got sucked in to the great idea that $5 a month for drupal hosting would be the perfect amount to pay for hosting 20 websites all under one account. With hosting competition continuing to battle it out, it actually didn't sound all that unreasonable. So we actually jumped in with a number of brand new accounts. Truthfully, their hosting service handled our Drupal 7 accounts rather well.  The requirements were met as needed by the drupal 7 installation (See our sample drupal 7 website still maintained through our vacant account on AN Hosting - Catch it during busy hours to see it struggle to load). 

Here is what happens when you only pay $5 per month for Hosting

First, your drupal 7 hosting service through AN Hosting is amazing. You pay your 2 years contract up front and they get you set up within a few hours of your registration. This is great! Fully loaded with cpanel, phpmyadmin, ftp, emails, spam prevention, and a ton of other great services to make your administration easy. We were so impressed by this service that we immediately went out and spread the word to all my hosting buddies, letting them know that the new king in hosting service is AN Hosting and that what they offer is literally too good to be true!   The even met all of the drupal 7 hosting requirements!

Then, about one month goes by and your service has been hardly interrupted at all. Because you don't really check your website every day to see how well it is running, you notice one day that your emails are taking an extra lengthy amount of time to load into your outlook. You check your Internet connection to see if it is down, and sure enough, you got the full 25Mbps download rate going. No issues there.

You do some web testing and all sites seem to load quickly. Then you check out your own website hosting on the AN Hosting (Midphase) servers and that darn page takes about 1 minute to load. Your home page is not even busy with all types of graphics or anything. Quite simply, the server is just not spitting out your website in a timely manner.

In fact, you try reloading the page to see if maybe it was a quick glitch and it picks up speed on the second try. Nope, the web page hangs for about a minute again and then this time returns a page error.

Step three in this process of hosting with AN Hosting is then to contact customer support. I have to say that customer support is fairly quick in response. I mean, looking back on how many times they must get contacted about serving up slow web pages, they seem to be very quick to look into the issue and usually do a quick apache service restart.

So your website then gains its speed back, but of course this is only temporary. The very next day around the same time, your site begins to slow.

Step four in the process. You realize you got hosed. You realize that AN Hosting is not in it for the long run. They are in it for a two year span of crappy hosting knowing that you will pay for the 2 year package deal. They know that they will offer great service during their 30 day money-back guarantee phase, and then overload your hosting server as soon as your guarantee period has expired. They know that as soon as the word gets out about how junky their service is, they will just change their domain name and sprout another poor quality hosting service for the same discounted rate...and we will likely buy it.

Why? Because we so want to believe that someone out there truly does offer great drupal 7 hosting for $5 a month. We so want to believe that if we pay bottom dollar for a hosting provider, they will give us top dollar hosting product. But it just doesn't work like that. You can simply expect top dollar hosting for about 30 days and then mega-slow days to occur once they overload your server with a ton of poorly managed websites.

Really, what should we expect to occur when a hosting server is loaded with site after site of poorly maintained, non-optimized websites. Why should a programmer worry about optimizing the speed of their website if they really don't have to worry about the entire hosting server? The combination of too many websites and too many poorly developed websites on one server makes for a lot of CPU and memory over-usage. You and your cheap web hosting desires are simply flying out the window.

Recent Update

An Hosting recently contacted all of its customers offering them a new "Power Boost" to their current shared hosting service.  The offer from them for this Power Boost includes:

• Enhanced Performance
• More CPU and Memory Availability
• Free Static IP address

This offer came on the heals of discovering that many of their shared hosting servers were flagged as spam carriers.  Ultimately, what happend was anyone using their servers for email found that all messages being sent through their servers were flagged as spam.  In an effort to remedy this issue, they decided to offer more expensive hosting to those suffering with a poor hosting experience. 

They are selling this service for $17.95/month on yearly contracts.  A decent price for good hosting, but a poor price for shotty sales practices.  No, we are done with AN Hosting's failed attempts at giving low quality hosting for a cheap cost.  There are much better drupal 7 hosts out there.

How We Got Sucked In to AN Hosting to Be our Drupal 7 Hosting Company

We were first introduced to AN Hosting by Mr. John Forsythe and his blog post on AN Hosting. And I'm sure his experience was true. He was very impressed with AN Hosting. They better give him the best results because he has a powerful review out there pushing their product. But guess what, for the average user that does not have the pull John Forsythe might have, AN Hosting could care very little about how many times a day your websites see a 1 minute page load. They do not worry that your server runs into down time every morning when the masses check their emails.

Where to Go From Here?

No, AN Hosting is no longer our hosting service of choice. We got hosed and we are sorry if we hosed anyone else out there by spreading the news about what we thought was a great service. In order to make it up to those who got sucked into the AN Hosting dream scenario, we wanted to let you know about the alternative we have come up with for ourselves. You can read further if you are disgusted with your AN Hosting service and want an alternative.

So we had enough websites that needed critical, always-up, no delays hosting. So we went out and got our own dedicated and managed servers. For us, this is now what we do:

• Emails we now go through the free google app email service. If you didn't know you could host your own domain's emails through google apps, you will be pleased to know that the same great spam fighting and webmail services that you get through gmail are available to your business and personal domains.
• MySQL server is now managed on our own managed server. We have never experienced a time delay on any of our MySQL server requests. That is because we control all of the databases on this web server. We control all of the scripts doing look-ups. There is no website being hosted that does not pass under our radar taking up all of our web processing power.
• PHP scripts and the php service have been kept up to the latest version due to our own managed hosting service. We do not have to worry that a hosting company will put a server in motion and not do an update to the latest version. Nor do we have to worry that a hosting company will run through a hasty php update without knowing the script implications.
• Hosting Video is all done through YouTube and embedded into our pages. So we never have to worry about overloading our server with massive video files that can take a lot of server power to service.
• Basic html pages get delivered with maximum power without a ton of competition to be retrieved.

Our Offer to You

In our efforts to pay it forward to those who like us were screwed by AN Hosting, we want to offer a spot on our managed web server for the same price as AN Hosting. This offer is only available to those coming from AN Hosting as we are trying to make it up to those we may have directed into purchasing an AN Hosting account. No worries if this does not sound like something you care to try out. We are not trying to steal hosting clients. We instead are simply sharing our dedicated hosting space.

The current rate for AN Hosting is $7.95 per month on the 1 year purchase. We will provide this same service to you at a $7.95 / month rate. You do not need to pay a full year in advance, you also do not need to pay a set up fee. We will set up your account free of charge. Once your account is set up, you will be given phpmyadmin.  We are not looking to take over AN Hosting's job as a cost effective hosting provider.  Honestly, we are just looking to 1) Share the cost of our managed dedicated server with other quality websites.  2) Give back to those that have been unfortunate like us to get sucked in to a poor drupal 7 hosting solution.

This offer is only available to the first 100 that meet the requirements.

You will set up your email through an outside service such as google apps (50 email accounts free). We will support your web hosting including:

• 500 MB of webspace
• 5 GB of Monthly Bandwidth Transfer
• 1 MySQL database (as many tables as you want under this database)
• PHPMyAdmin Access for database setup
• 1 FTP account
• The latest PHP released for CentOS 5 hosting
• 1 domain name
• Error and Access log files
• SSH connection not available for this package

Contact us to request your special Drupal 7 Hosting Replacement Account

Specifics

• We reserve the right to monitor your web scripts and website. If your scripts are deemed to be poorly coded and causing our servers to have issues, you will be warned and given 7 days to correct for minor offenses. For major offenses, your website could be shut down immediately. We run a number of drupal and wordpress sites that have never had any issues. However, our experience has found that Joomla! websites have run into some offenses in the past. If you are hosting a Joomla website, hosting with us would not be the best solution for you.
• Companies serving up smaller Drupal and Wordpress websites will benefit the most from this package. If you expect to have a high volume of pages served per day (over 1,000 pages per day) then our package is not the right one for you.
• We will never overload our web hosting server. Our guarantee is to never host more than 100 websites per dedicated server. Again, our goal is not to be a web hosting company. We are simply trying to assist those who like us suffered under poor AN Hosting or Midphase conditions.
• In order to qualify for this service, you must write us your troubled hosting testimonial/story that we will share for the others on this website.  This can be done after contacting us.