You have the domain name, you have chosen Drupal to be your website CMS, and everything else that you need, is right where you want it. The next important step is to decide on the Drupal hosting plan for your website. An ideal hosting plan is the one that can perform efficiently and at the same time be cost effective as well. That is what most of us look out for.

When we talk about Drupal, it is a well known fact that the best environment for a Drupal website is Linux. In addition, based on the type of your website, the hosting plan has to be selected. For example, if your website is a simple one which showcases your business, displays products and personal blog, a basic hosting plan comprising of a single core CPU, 1G Ram and about 200Mb disk is more than sufficient to run your site smoothly.

If you think along the same lines, you can figure out that, with the website characteristics, the traffic, as well as the investment that you have made, also play a huge role in choosing the appropriate hosting plan. Lets dig in a little more into that piece of information.

Shared Hosting

This one is for all of you out there who don't want to spend a lot of money on website hosting, and at the same time do not want to worry about the configuration or the system maintenance also. You can find lots of free providers like weebly, Xwix or 000webhost, who aim at providing free website hosting for new users. If you are a new user, share hosting is the best solution for you as it not only saves you from spending extra bucks, but also allows you to stay away from the technical issues.

But you need to remember that it has its own cons. For example, if your traffic rises, then this hosting can certainly not handle it, and as a result, you will witness your own site crash! Ya nobody wants that! So keep in mind the aim and the characteristic of your drupal website before using shared host.

Virtual Private Server (VPS Hosting)

This one is quite interesting. Imagine a computer, and a number of virtual machines installed inside. In other words, a VPS runs its own copy of an OS, thus allowing you to have superuser access. This means that you have the access to all the parameters, and can interfere, edit or remove any parameter that you want.

This type of hosting, which is a bit more costlier than the shared hosting, has one server partitioned into multiple servers, which in turn are virtualized to act as separate dedicated servers. But the lack of scalability, and the ability to function when one of the servers go down being the major drawbacks, the availability factor of the VPS is very less. On the brighter side, VPS hosting gives you higher specifications than the Shared Hosting, to handle the increased traffic on your Drupal website in a productive manner.

Dedicated Server

The name says it all! This type of Drupal hosting allows you to have your own dedicated server by renting a private server, and handing over all the responsibilities to them. The fact that no resources such as RAM, CPU etc will be shared from other hostings, makes Dedicated Server a better choice than the VPS.

On the not-so-bright side of the dedicated server, it requires high system management skills for a person to keep track of this type of hosting. With its high cost and high maintenance, dedicated server helps in maintaining a constant website speed in spite of increase in traffic.

Cloud Hosting

The best of the lot, this type of website hosting is the perfect example for a low cost and high performance Drupal Hosting. The best part of this hosting is that, suppose your website has a big event or something, and as a result, has a huge number of traffic. During such times, you can increase your resources then, and when it is over, you can get back to your original specification. This not only helps you to maintain your website during high traffic, but also results in saving your cost.

For the people looking out for complete isolation from others, cloud hosting is the ideal choice as it provides an environment where you are totally separated from the others. Cloud Hosting also allows you to choose any operating system of your choice, unlike the VPS, which can offer only one OS depending upon the virtualization method. With ease of administration and backup when necessary, adding feathers to its cap, cloud hosting is the most efficient and most preferable type of web hosting in the present world.