There are tons of different options for hosting a new site. For the long version, our hosting guide walks through a bunch of different kinds of hosting, providing a lot more detail around what you should do -- however, to make this simple, here are 3 different recommendations, from big to small:
Premium dedicated hosting (Virtual Private Server)
This is for companies that want to have full control over their hosting environment, and are willing to cover the costs of keeping it properly secured. This is good for clients with multiple developers, e-commerce, custom integrations, or other governance needs.
There are 4 different parts to this to consider:
- The actual cloud host -- we recommend Linode or Digital Ocean over the big cloud providers (Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) primarily because they include a reasonable amount of bandwidth at a fixed price. We're seeing hosting at the big players suddenly getting more expensive thanks to the proliferation of AI bots that are crawling everybody's sites. (Note that these are referral links that do provide $100-$200 of free credit).
- Server maintenance
- Drupal or WordPress protection plans
- Backup service
All told, having us run your own dedicated server will run around $900 per month.
You pay the cloud host directly for hosting, and we then manage it all for you. We highly recommend having a backup service at a different provider, and if you already have one, we can help make sure your web server data is getting correctly backed up. If you do not, we can provide a basic backup service.
Platform hosting
There are 3 big Drupal "Platform" hosts -- Pantheon, Acquia, and Platform.sh -- and a growing list of others. We are Pantheon Partners, so working with us you can get a lower rate at Pantheon than going directly.
Platform hosts are good if you want to manage the site yourself -- they handle all the server infrastructure and provide a web-based control panel to help you manage your own releases while providing strong security and deployment pipelines to enforce best practices.
Hosting costs vary based on how much traffic you get. The actual hosting costs can be substantially higher than a premium dedicated host, but you don't need our server maintenance service -- so for most sites, this will cost a bit less than the Premium option while still having us do our protection plan.
You do have as much access to the hosting as we do -- but it is limited in terms of how much the platform itself can be customized.
- Pantheon hosting - be sure to add "Freelock LLC" as a "Supporting organization" to get better rates
- Drupal or WordPress protection plans
- Backup service
You pay Pantheon directly for the actual hosting, and pay us for the protection plan. We always recommend having a secondary backup service at a different provider -- if you have your own backup service already, we can help set up a recurring export so you can use that.
Freelock hosting
We offer some very basic hosting for our clients. Our servers are locked down, secure, and optimized for Drupal -- however, we do not permit direct server access to anyone not on our team. If we're managing everything for your site, this is a low-cost option, because we're already handling the server management and backups -- all you need to cover is hosting and the protection plan.
- Freelock hosting
- Drupal or WordPress protection plans
For this option, the hosting charge is negligible -- when we are providing hosting on a platform we control, it costs us less to provide service, and we have far more control over the risks associated with commodity shared hosting.