Drupal sites perform best when they are deployed into a hosting environment tailored for Drupal. Learn what sort of questions to ask, what to look for, what to expect to pay, and how to measure what you get from a hosting company. This session will cover the following: * What does Drupal need from a hosting company? * How can a hosting company influence the performance of Drupal? * What can be done to test the performance of Drupal on a particular hosting company? * How do I keep my hosting company accountable? * What do I do if I want to move my site to another company? Time will be planned to take questions from the audience about hosting Drupal as well.

1. Drupal Hosting Mike Hostetler A Mountain Top, LLC @mikehostetler

2. A few assumptions ...

3. Assumption #1: Drupal needs hosting

4. Assumption #2: Not all hosting is created equal

5. Assumption #3: Not all Drupal needs the same hosting

6. This creates choices

7. A choice for you, as the Drupal expert

8. A choice for your client

9. How do I decide?

10. How do I help my client decide?

11. Ask the Drupal Spaceman

12. Just Kidding

13. Not Really ...

14. Decision #1 Decide what business you are in?

15. Are you a designer?

16. Are you a developer?

17. Do you want to get phone calls at 2am?

18. You probably don't

19. Hosting is a completely different business

20. Redirect Hosting FAIL Anger

21. Answer #1: Be the person who can call and yell at the hosting company on behalf of your client

22. Decision #2: Estimate the level of resources your site needs

23. Estimate your users

24. Estimate your nodes

25. Are you hosting or embedding Rich Media?

26. Estimate your traffic, in simultaneous users

27. Answer #2: Planning and projecting your resources is critical to choosing your hosting vendor

28. Decision #3: Choose the type of hosting & the vendor

29. There are 4 major types of hosting

30. Shared Hosting

31. Virtual Private Servers

32. Dedicated Single-Server

33. Dedicated Multi-Server

34. TIP: Google cares about hosting

35. TIP: You probably need less then you think ...

36. TIP: Shared hosting is like replacing a Ferrari's engine with a Hamster Wheel

37. TIP: Before choosing a vendor, submit a support ticket and time the response

38. How do I find a vendor?

39. http://drupal.org/hosting

40. Ask people at a Drupal Meetup or Camp

41. Decision #3: Choose the level of Drupal performance tuning

42. After the site is built ...

43. Administer -> Site Configuration -> Performance

44. Caching Mode: Normal

45. Advanced Caching: http://drupal.org/node/97347

46. Enable Page Compression

47. Enable Block Cache (if appropriate)

48. Optimize CSS Files

49. DO NOT Optimize Javascript Files

50. Test with Firebug and Yslow http://getfirebug.com http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow

51. Server Side Optimizations

52. APC – Alternative PHP Cache

53. APC – Alternative PHP Cache

55. Memcached

56. Decision #4 Plan how to keep your hosting company accountable

57. Netcraft Uptime Survey http://uptime.netcraft.com

58. Netcraft Uptime Survey http://uptime.netcraft.com

59. Pingdom http://pingdom.com

60. Many other tools ...

61. Thank You

62. Mike Hostetler A Mountain Top, LLC @mikehostetler http://amountaintop.com