List of features a Drupal hosting service should have...

Question

I'm looking for a hosting service for Drupal to suggest to all my next customers, to be sure I'm not going to have development issues.

I'm writing down a list of features a Drupal hosting service should have:

1. Control panel with zip compress / decompress functionality After I uploaded drupal to new server, I usually don't have ssh access, and php scripts sometimes cause files permissions issues. It is better to do it from control panel.

2. PHP Memory Limit: 128MB (or more ?) I don't want anymore to see out of memory messages. This is an important point.

3. PHP post_max_size Some users couldn't upload long videos (with CCK Upload fields) because of this limit. What's a reasonable value for it ?

4. Rewrite Module Enabled I'm not sure all hosting services have it enabled. Or am I wrong ? I should ask for it if I want to use clean urls, correct ?

5. IMAP E-mail ? I want to be able to setup e-mail services for my customers. They should be able to setup multilple client e-mail applications with their e-mail account and a copy of their e-mails should remain on the server. This is what IMAP protocol does.. correct ? Should I ask for it, if I want this e-mail functionality or I can handle it differently ?

6. Automatic backup. I want my website always online. This means that a copy of my drupal installation should be automatically created on a backup server and ready to use if the server is down.

Could you please correct, or suggest features to add ? Thanks!

Answer 1

You missed one!

PHP > 5.2

redhat/centos isn't a new enough version

Answer 2

There are some more obscure MySQL configurations that can be problematic for Drupal, as far as I remember you need CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE permissions for the Drupal search.

Depending on your site a lower PHP memory limit should also be OK.

Don't rely on the Hosting Provider's backup, always make your own backups. A ready to use backup server won't be part of any affordable webspace.

Most hosters allow you to try out their services on a temporary account, I would just do that to see if there are any problems.

Answer 3

post_max_size should ideally be slightly larger than upload_max_size.

IMO, there are few more things to consider. For instance:

• PHP not running in Safe Mode (this introduces enormous issues).
• PHP is preferably running as an Apache module (CGI/FCGI are fine if you know what you're doing).
• Drupal user has ALL PRIVILEGES on its database (to create temporary tables for instance).
• A large key and index buffer size for MySQL (useful for large queries carried by Views).
• Allow Apache user to access drupal.org (yes, I had a situation where a hosting provider didn't allow it and Drupal status updates were useless).