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We spend countless hours gathering requirements, documenting use cases, creating an intuitive user interface and design templates. We did our homework and the website site in the development environment is contemporary, insightful and responsive on all gadgets. The client scrutinizes the website on the test environment and we get a signoff and are ready to deploy the Drupal website on some hosting platform, pull the trigger and switch domains. Typically, the hosting platform question has already been answered and planned for in advance, verifying that the hosting vendor has a solid track record in running websites engineered in Drupal.

Hosting a Drupal powered website is different from hosting a static HTML website or even a robust Java or .Net site because the technology stack powering Drupal is just a little distinct.  So, why select a specialized Drupal hosting provider and not just a $5.99/month vendor? I mean Drupal runs on generic and open source technologies (PHP, Apache/Nginx, MySQL) and that stack is readily available on almost any hosting platform? Well, for the most part, because a robust Drupal website will greatly benefit from some add-on technologies that are geared for a content management system (CMS). For instance: Varnish for page caching, Solr core for facetted search, redis for advanced key-value caching, APC for PHP code caching, code deployment via Git pushes, running commands via Drush aliases, access to DB dumps, infrastructure monitoring, application level monitoring (NewRelic, TraceView), etc. So it is definitely beneficial to work with a Drupal specific hosting provider that understands the technology ecosystem surrounding Drupal and where the first-line support crew has solid Drupal expertise.

There are a number of Drupal hosting vendors out there but two providers stand out from the pack, partly because their founders have reputable names in the Drupal world: Dries Buytaert of Acquia and Matt Cheney of Pantheon. These two vendors provide an excellent infrastructure that is specifically geared and engineered for the Drupal technology stack. It happens that I am on a project for a government entity and its Drupal powered websites are humming along at Acquia while at the same time our corporate Function1.com Drupal website and other Drupal contractual development work is running at Pantheon; so I have some exposure to the two vendors’ environments.   

Underlying Infrastructure

Acquia provisions its environment at Amazon EC2, so when we subscribed to Acquia for a given number of docroots (a docroot connotes to a website) we selected EC2 instances that accommodated the load and traffic of said websites. The spectrum at Acquia (Amazon AWS behind the curtain) is wide and ranges from m3.medium with 1 CPU and 4GB of RAM all the way up to a colossal i2.8xlarge with some 32 CPU cores and 244GB of RAM. Our needs averaged around the m1.large configuration (2 CPUs and 8GB of RAM) and a good source of reference for the VM instance sizing exercise is the amount of traffic recorded with Google Analytics and the size of the database in terms of the number of nodes (content items).

Pantheon’s underlying infrastructure is different; they use containers. A container is a partition of a host operating system (mostly Linux) into an isolated space. That is possible because the Linux Kernel allows lightweight partitioning of a host operating system into these self-contained spaces. Inside each container (space) is a PHP-FPM worker process that provisions dynamic requests from Drupal. From a hosting provider standpoint, there are inherent advantages in terms of infrastructure management as these containers are easier to provision and scale than virtual machines.

Hosting Cost

From the perspective of a user shopping for a hosting facility, the underlying infrastructure layer is transparent and is inconsequential but what matters most for us is a cost-benefit analysis compared with our host requirements. The underlying infrastructure becomes a factor because it seems the cost of running a website on a container-based hosting facility is lower than provisioning it on a virtual machine/EC2. A professional plan at Pantheon runs for $100/month whereas a comparable plan at Acquia on a t2.medium instance (2 vCPU + 4GB RAM + 25GB storage) is at the $200/month mark.

Customer Support

Both hosting facilities have excellent first-line support staff that have solid Drupal expertise though by scouting through different forum sites, I found that some customers find Acquia’s front line support to be a tad more skilled.

Versatility

From a Drupal developer standpoint, we might be developing on the latest PHP 5.6 version and some of our code might work with one version of PHP but might not be compatible on an older version as there might be some deprecated functions. Acquia is flexible and lets us choose between different PHP flavors (5.2, 5.3, 5.5 and 5.6) whereas at Pantheon that level of granularity is limited to two versions (5.3 and 5.5). Acquia also lets us configure additional PHP settings: PHP max execution time, PHP memory, and PHP opcode cache size. At Pantheon these settings are preset.

Git and Branching

As far as support for Git branching, both platforms support multi-branching and we can associate any Git branch with any given environment at the host. The difference is that Pantheon gives us the flexibility to provision new environments from its dashboard through its multidev feature and we can create and delete these environments as needed. However, to make use of multidev, we’ll need to upgrade the hosting plan to “Business” at $400/month.

At Acquia we’ll need to contact customer support to provision a new environment for us and we are constrained to a given number of environments depending upon the selected EC2 instance configuration. The higher the instance configuration, the costlier it is, the more environments that can be provisioned.

Multisite Support

That is an advantage at Acquia as it supports multisite Drupal setups while at Pantheon multisite isn’t supported and they have a strong argument for that.

So Where?

So, where to host? Well, I am going to adopt the time honored professional consultant stance: it depends! There are pros and cons for each. Acquia is the flagship of Drupal hosting and it offers a detailed level of granularity in terms of fine-tuning your configuration that is second to renting your own EC2 instance and managing your LAMP stack yourself.  But Acquia’s flexibility comes at a premium cost.

At Pantheon, that level of granularity isn’t there but these containers’ PHP worker processes are fine-tuned and you may never need to worry about that. But Pantheon’s real advantage is in its multidev feature. For $400/month you are provided with the flexibility of spinning countless new environments as needed and that is a great benefit if you are working among a dynamic team and each is working on a different feature branch and need your own development cloud workspace before merging with master. Because the underlying infrastructure is flexible, you won’t need to worry about upgrading to a higher EC2 instance.

So it really depends :-)