Typo3
Hosting

TYPO3 is the enterprise CMS most British developers haven't heard of and most German developers swear by. It's been around since 1998, predates WordPress and Drupal both, and has been the default enterprise CMS choice in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) for over two decades. UK adoption is smaller but real, mostly through European-headquartered enterprises, manufacturers with European operations, and universities with German-speaking partners.

I host TYPO3 for a couple of UK clients with European parent companies, where TYPO3 is the group standard and the UK site has to fit into the same content infrastructure. The pattern is invariably the same: enterprise client, multi-language requirements, structured content modelling that goes well beyond posts and pages, granular editorial workflow, and an in-house development team comfortable with TYPO3's particular conventions.

What works well: the structured content modelling is genuinely sophisticated. TYPO3's content elements, with their type-driven rendering and configurable backends, give editorial teams a level of control over what can go on a page that few other CMSs match. Multi-language is excellent and built around the assumption that you have several languages, not bolted on later. Workspaces, the editorial preview-and-review workflow, are a serious feature. Permissions are extremely granular.

"TYPO3 is the right answer when an enterprise needs structured editorial across multiple languages with proper review workflow and the budget for a real build. It's overkill for a small business site, and that's fine, it isn't aimed at small businesses."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

What's annoying: the learning curve. TYPO3 has its own conventions, its own terminology (TypoScript, TCA, FlexForms, you'll learn them all), and a culture of doing things the TYPO3 way. None of that is wrong, but it means a developer coming from WordPress or Drupal needs months not weeks to be productive. Documentation is thorough but often dense. The extension marketplace is large but quality varies and you'll need to evaluate carefully.

Hosting profile: TYPO3 wants real infrastructure. PHP 8.2+, Composer, MySQL 8 with a reasonable buffer pool, OPcache, ideally Redis or Memcached, plenty of memory (we'd suggest 1GB minimum for the PHP process on a serious site), and Composer-based deployment from a Git repository. Our managed cloud servers from £9.99/mo are the entry point; production TYPO3 sites typically sit on our higher-tier cloud plans because the editorial workflow with multiple concurrent editors benefits from headroom.

For TYPO3 deployments we set up Composer in deploy hooks, configure OPcache aggressively, set Redis as the cache backend, separate database backups from filesystem backups (TYPO3's processed-file directory can be huge), and tune MySQL for the TYPO3 query patterns which are heavier than most CMSs. CDN with pre-caching helps with anonymous-user page load. Multi-language sites benefit particularly from CDN because language-variant pages cache independently.

If you're choosing TYPO3, you almost certainly already know why. It's not a casual choice. If you have an experienced TYPO3 developer or agency, and your project genuinely needs structured multi-language editorial workflow, it's an excellent platform. If you don't have TYPO3 experience in your team and you're not committed to learning it, look at Drupal or SilverStripe first; the talent pool in the UK is larger.