Drupal
Hosting

Drupal is the platform you reach for when WordPress isn't enough and Craft CMS is too small. That's not damning either of those, it's just where Drupal lives. Multi-author editorial workflows with proper editorial states, content types with deeply nested fields, granular per-role permissions, multi-language sites where each language is a first-class citizen, and integrations with enterprise identity providers, that's all Drupal territory and it's territory Drupal has owned for over twenty years.

I've hosted Drupal sites for agencies and in-house teams since the Drupal 6 days. Drupal 7 was the last "small Drupal" major version, friendly enough to run on shared hosting, simple enough to extend without Symfony knowledge. Drupal 8 onwards became enterprise software, with Composer-based deployment, a Symfony-derived architecture, and a steeper learning curve. That move was the right call for the projects that need Drupal, but it priced out the small-site users who have largely moved to Backdrop or WordPress.

What works well in current Drupal: the editorial workflow tools (Workspaces, Content Moderation, scheduled publishing) are genuinely good. The Views module is still the gold standard for "build me a list of any combination of content with any sort of filtering or display." Multi-language is excellent. The taxonomy system is unmatched. Once you've built a Drupal site properly, the admin experience for editors is calm and powerful.

"Drupal is the right answer for complex editorial sites that need to still make sense in five years. The build cost is higher than WordPress, the hosting cost is higher than WordPress, and the result is a site that doesn't have to be rebuilt every two years to keep up with the latest plug-in churn. For the right project, that trade is obviously worth it."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

What's annoying: the learning curve. Drupal has its own opinions about everything, and learning them takes months not weeks. Module compatibility between major versions still requires care. The hosting requirements are non-trivial: PHP 8.5, MySQL 8, OPcache, ideally Redis or Memcached, plenty of memory, and Composer-based deployment. None of that is exotic in 2026, but it does mean Drupal is not running on a £3/mo shared host and looking good.

Hosting profile: we run Drupal on our managed cloud servers from £9.99/mo upwards. PHP 8.5 with tuned OPcache, MySQL 8 with a reasonable buffer pool, Redis for cache backend and sessions, and Composer-based deployment from a Git repository. We back up code, database, and uploaded files separately so a content restore doesn't have to be a full system rollback. We've hosted Drupal sites doing 600,000 visits a month on a single mid-tier cloud server with the right caching layer.

For UK clients, the latency win of UK-based hosting on Drupal is significant because Drupal page renders, even with caching, are heavier than static-page CMSs. Every 50ms of round-trip time you save matters more on Drupal than on a flat WordPress site. We've moved a few Drupal sites from US-hosted "Drupal-friendly" platforms to our UK cloud servers and seen UK page-load times drop substantially.

If you're choosing Drupal, choose it because the project needs it: complex content modelling, multi-language, multi-author editorial workflow, enterprise identity integration, public-sector compliance requirements. If you're not sure whether you need Drupal, you probably don't and WordPress will do the job at half the cost. If you do need Drupal, we'll host it properly.