Drupal’s overall market share has fallen a lot over the past decade, down to a little over 1% of the CMS market from around 7% in 2013. What’s left is a smaller, more specific base: government agencies, universities, and enterprises with complex content structures who chose Drupal for its flexibility and have stuck with it. If that’s you, hosting matters more than it does for a typical CMS, because Drupal sites tend to be larger, more customized, and more consequential to keep running than the average blog.
This guide covers what a Drupal site actually needs from a host, how to think honestly about the hosting tiers available, and what AllCloudHost’s own Drupal-ready plans look like in real terms.
What Drupal Actually Needs From a Host
Drupal runs on PHP and MySQL like most CMS platforms, but it tends to be heavier: more modules, larger databases, and more complex page-building logic than a typical WordPress site. That means the baseline matters more here. Current, well-supported PHP and MySQL versions aren’t optional the way they might be for a simpler site, and a one-click Drupal installer at signup avoids a manual setup process that has more places to go wrong than most CMS installs. Support that’s actually dealt with Drupal-specific issues, module conflicts, cache configuration, database performance at scale, is worth more here than for most platforms, since generic hosting support often hasn’t seen the kind of problems a real Drupal deployment runs into.
Being Honest About Hosting Tiers
Shared hosting can run a Drupal site fine for smaller deployments: a departmental site, a nonprofit’s main site, anything without heavy custom module use or high traffic. It’s the cheapest way to get Drupal live, and for a lot of real-world Drupal sites, that’s genuinely enough.
Where shared hosting starts to show its limits is with larger or more complex builds, sites with a lot of custom modules, heavier traffic, or content structures that put real load on the database. At that point a VPS, with dedicated CPU and RAM instead of a shared pool, is worth the extra cost. Root access also matters more for Drupal than for simpler platforms, since some module and performance configurations need it.
Beyond that sit the specialized Drupal-focused platforms (Acquia, Platform.sh, Pantheon, and similar), built specifically around Drupal’s deployment model with things like multi-environment workflows and Drupal-tuned caching. They’re built for genuinely large, complex deployments, government portals, major media sites, and priced accordingly. Most Drupal sites don’t need that level of infrastructure, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than assuming bigger and more specialized always means better for your specific site.
What to Check Before You Choose
- Uptime guarantee, ideally 99.9% or better, backed by an actual SLA.
- One-click Drupal install, so setup doesn’t turn into a manual configuration project.
- Current PHP and MySQL versions, actively maintained rather than left to fall behind.
- Root access, at least as an option, for module and performance configuration that needs it.
- Backup frequency, and how straightforward restoring from one actually is.
- Support that’s dealt with Drupal specifically, not just generic hosting tickets. This matters more for Drupal than most CMS platforms given how much more there is to configure wrong.
AllCloudHost’s Drupal-Ready Plans
All of AllCloudHost’s shared hosting plans support a one-click Drupal install at signup, run current stable releases of Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and include a 99.9% uptime guarantee with an average support response time around 20 minutes. Here’s what the actual tiers look like:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Storage | Bandwidth | Sites Hosted | Free Domain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $3.99/mo | Unlimited | Unlimited | 1 | Yes |
| WordPress | $8.99/mo | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Yes |
| WordPress Pro | $11.99/mo | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Yes |
| Business | $4.99/mo | Unlimited | Unlimited | 5 | No ($11 if needed) |
The plan names come from AllCloudHost’s general shared hosting lineup rather than being Drupal-specific, but any of them will run Drupal since the underlying stack is the same. Starter suits a single departmental or organizational site. Business is worth a look if you’re managing several smaller Drupal sites under one account, up to five, at a lower monthly cost than the unlimited-site plans. All four include daily backups (up to 5GB), a free SSL certificate, ModSecurity protection, and the in-house Hepsia control panel. Every plan comes with a 30-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee, worth using to test real performance under your actual content before committing, since that matters more for Drupal than most platforms.
For deployments that have genuinely outgrown shared hosting, root access and dedicated resources on a VPS plan are the next step up.
Drupal™ is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert and is not affiliated with AllCloudHost.
Getting Started
If shared hosting fits your site’s actual scale, the 30-day free trial is the fastest way to see real performance with your own content rather than taking any host’s word for it. Full plan details and the order process are on the Drupal Hosting page.