How to Choose the Best Host for Drupal 8

At OSTraining we often get asked to help our clients make the right choice for Drupal hosting.

You may often hear that Drupal hosting is expensive, but there are some very reliable and affordable options available.

We're going to give you an overview of the essential and recommended features to look for in a Drupal host.

Drupal 8 essential requirements

The server needs to meet these minium requirements:

• PHP 5.5.9+ 
• More than 64MB of memory.

When it comes to the database, you need one of these five choices:

• MySQL 5.5.3
• MariaDB 5.5.20
• Percona Server 5.5.8 or higher with PDO and an InnoDB-compatible primary storage engine
• PostgreSQL 9.1.2 or higher with PDO
• SQLite 3.7.11 or higher

We have seen people use Drupal with other database, but often the result has been a lot of headaches and technical glitches.

Here are the official requirements on Drupal.org.

Drupal 8 recommended requirements

• PHP 7. While it is true that it can run on lower versions, Drupal 8 definitely does run faster on PHP7
• The ability to add and have access to Composer, Drush and Drupal Console.
• Full access to the database for imports and exports. 
• Command line access.
• Git support or an alternative form of version control.
• Staging is preferable so you can quickly and easily go from Dev to Testing and then Production environments.
• Automated backup tools. This should be a core feature provided by the host.
• 24/7 support. You need access to a team that knows Drupal well.

For these reasons, we find it hard to recommend hosting services such as Amazon and Azure. They are cheap, but lack the support and tools needed to provide a great Drupal hosting experience.

Here at OSTraining, we recommend Rochen, Inmotion, Pantheon and Acquia:

See our recommended Drupal hosts

About the author

Daniel is a web designer from UK, who's a friendly and helpful part of the support team here at OSTraining.