Drupal Multisite Hosting

Guest

I'm looking for a hosting service to support a Drupal installation. We are looking at using subdomains in combination with Multisite to support multiple customers' sites. The idea is that a customer will sign up for the service, we'll run a script to set up a new drupal site for them with its own database and populated from a template site defined in a database script, all using a shared Drupal codebase.

Is this something that you can support? If so, which package would be suitable? I have had some bad experience with other hosting sites who offer Drupal but are not optimised for Drupal 6. Can you confirm that your packages are optimised for Drupal 6? E.g. what is the PHP memory limit? Do you have stats for average Drupal page generation times?

We are looking to start small, but anticipate the need to scale up. Do you offer a performance, scalability and availability upgrade path?

Finally, what is your policy regarding limits on traffic loads? Do you impose limits and if so, what happens when those limits are breached?

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1013

Hi Pete,

Drupal 6 Multisite compatibility with cPanel means that this will only run from a single cPanel account without creating a security risk on a shared server, if you are planning to be the only user/administrator and do not need clients to have their own cPanel access then this is fine.

Depending on the scale of what you are planning obviously affects the plan recommendations, our hosting is fully scalable though. There is a migration path all the way through from our shared plans, reseller, vps and dedicated server with cPanel, we will assist with migration and there would be no downtime involved at any stage.

We allow memory_limit as well as many other useful PHP variables to be set via custom php.ini files and support many clients running Drupal 6 installs including single codebase multisite installs. We do not have stats for average page generation times, this would vary from install to install depending on modifications and plugins.

The only usage limitation we have on our shared servers would be that you are not adversely affecting the service for other clients, to be honest the only times we've really had to use this tend to be when people are using faulty scripts that are looping or similar. If your sites were using an inordinate amount of resources then we would get in touch with you and discuss options, whether this be optimising your site, tweaking MySQL queries or if the only option then migration to an isolated service such as VPS.

If you have any further questions please let me know!

Regards,

Darryl

Guest

Darryl,

Thanks for your quick response. Am I right in thinking that the Starter Reseller plan would be the best package for us to kick off with?

In addition, is it possible to use Drupal to invoke a script that creates a new database instance, a new subdomain, and a new Drupal site subfolder and complete the Drupal installation process?

Finally, do you have support for automated downloads of mySQL backups?

Regards,

Pete

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1013

Pete,

No problem, I do believe the Starter Reseller would be a sensible plan to start with.

I can't see any reason this wouldn't be possible but I'm not sure how easy to implement it would be, cPanel offer a developer API that you can make calls to directly to achieve these kind of things so if coding is your forte it should be possible to achieve.

Not quite sure how automated you mean, we offer for instance cron jobs via cPanel, you could schedule a mysqldump task and have your local backup server automatically grab the backups.

Regards,

Darryl

Guest

Darryl,

We have development resources so this is a possible approach. Thanks again for your help.

The backup process sounds fine - we can work with that approach.

Thanks again.

Pete

Guest

Darryl,

I notice that you offer cPanel 11. Do you know if it is 11.25 or higher? This version offers the JSON XML API.

Regards,

Pete

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1013

Pete,

Great, sounds like you should get on fine.

Regards,

Darryl

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1013

Pete,

Yes we offer 11.25, this is the latest stable release.

Regards,

Darryl

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