Looking back, Drupal was initially launched only as a small message board software for students.
Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and his friends gathered together back in 2001 and decided to start with small steps, but they ended up creating something much more significant: A content management system that powers influential sites such as Tesla, The White House, the Government of France, Warner Music, and Nokia!
Drupal reaches $5.5 million in revenue per year, and more importantly, 97% of users are amazed by Drupal’s efficient performance.
Whether you are a developer, marketer, or business owner of an agency, RoseHosting takes all the guesswork out of having your Drupal server and more.
Are you afraid to manually set up and install your own Drupal website? Start with our fully managed support.
Want to make a move and switch from your existing hosting service to ours? Start with our migration services.
Table of Contents
What is Drupal and What Exactly Makes it Different?
Drupal is now a first-class open-source content management system (CMS) that was released in 2001 by Dries Buytaert. This CMS is the third most popular content management system worldwide, behind only WordPress and Joomla. Anyone can take advantage of Drupal CMS, including being used for world-famous and even government websites that can handle high traffic.
Drupal is a powerful content management system that can help you grow revenue and establish long-term loyalty with your customers by having a fast and reliable website. It gives you all of the customization you need for creating an eye-catching website that will encourage visitors to find the ideal solution for their needs.
This system accounts for only 3.7% of all hacked content management systems, which makes it one of the most secure CMS ever. This is mainly caused by it requiring a high level of technical knowledge and is why it is best for larger websites.
Drupal has many robust features that provide your customers with the best digital experiences. Users can make use of thousands of themes, translations, and modules.
Since this CMS platform differs from WordPress and Joomla, its main features are worth considering.
So, exactly what makes this CMS so special?
- It offers intuitive content creation and editing tools, giving you creative freedom
- It offers the highest security possible, so you can rest assured that hackers will have to try hard to access your information
- It allows you to have a multisite structure, which is great for your business growth
- It has a wide range of advanced management options and built-in access control system, giving you full control
- It offers around 40.000 module options and 3.000 themes that are very flexible
- It offers a wide range of add-on tools, which can help you expand your online reach
Together, these key points make for a very well-rounded CMS. But what exactly can you use this CMS for?
What Drupal is Used For
Drupal is used for building different types of websites, from simple and personal blogging sites to corporate websites. This CMS stands behind huge businesses, companies and influential institutions, such as the GRAMMY Awards, National Audubon Society, and Tesla. Using a CMS helps these websites to attract the right audience by delivering content across the web, commerce, mobile and social channels without unnecessary time and web development costs.
When opting for the best Drupal CMS hosting provider, you should pay attention if they provide servers with the latest versions of all of the software you need.
Other popular sites that use Drupal are:
There are different versions of Drupal CMS, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, Drupal 9 contains more features and enhancements than all other versions. RoseHosting can provide you with the latest and the best Drupal CMS version to give you the best possible website performance.
Drupal Features Explained
Intuitive Content Tools & Advanced Level of Customization
Drupal can accommodate unlimited content types and offers intuitive content creation and editing tools. In other words, the content will freely flow through connected devices, sites, and social networks, which leads to best-in-class flexibility.
Customizable menus are easy to use, and powerful display mode tools, including a wide range of media types, such as video, images, etc. help you manage your content better than ever. This gives you the creative freedom to stay on top of emerging trends in today’s fast-paced digital world.
Easy Content Revisioning & Structured Content
Drupal allows you to keep track of your content development stages, allowing you to manage content workflows easily. You can easily track all adjustments and revisions on your website; this is a must if you have multiple editors. Another advantage is creating a taxonomy for content and defining tag content based on attributes.
Mobile Editing & Device Optimization
Drupal is mobile-friendly and allows mobile editing, making it easy to approve content from iPhone, Android devices, and tablets.
High Scalability
Drupal is highly scalable, which will keep your website from going down. This way, you will avoid disappointing results in SEO rankings associated with periods of downtime.
Multisite Setup
The multisite structure feature allows you to manage many sites on a single platform. You can use a single codebase for more than one site. The most significant advantages are lower maintenance, reduced costs, as well as possibility to build brand new sites without having to search for professional developer support.
The Cache Content API Feature
Drupal has a Cache Content API Feature, which is vital for efficient website performance because it stores potentially hundreds or thousands of megabytes or gigabytes worth of network responses. This feature makes your website load faster to help you reach Google’s top rankings.
SEO Drupal
Another significant advantage of Drupal is its Pathauto module which allows you to generate SEO-friendly URLs automatically. On top of this, the Metatag module helps you to configure meta descriptions and meta titles. Overall, Drupal helps you organize your website’s meta information, which is essential for improving SEO rankings.
Drupal Security
The Drupal security team is one of the largest worldwide and can respond to the most critical internet vulnerabilities. With Drupal, you can minimize the risk of being hacked because it has robust database encryption to protect specific information, such as user accounts, particular forms, etc.
Brute force detection (bfd) and multi-layered cache architecture are some security features provided by Drupal. Brute force detection works in by blocking the IP address of a potential hacker by detecting failed login attempts. For example, an unusual or failed login attempt can clearly indicate a brute-force attack, which is a type of cyber-attack.
A multi-site architecture is a system that is running multiple websites on a single codebase. These websites have common resources and standardized elements while still retaining different features. The deployment is usually in the form of a centralized platform that offers all the shared resources, defining and maintaining a superset of functionality that provides great efficiencies and security.
Drupal Community
Another of Drupal’s strengths is its open-source community with 1.37 million members and over a million active contributors. Several significant contribution events happen every year, and small groups with excellent communication skills are willing to help everyone.
The best thing is that everyone in the Drupal community comes from different backgrounds, eagerly waiting to share skills and knowledge. If you want to find out how to find a local Drupal community group in your region, check out this page.
Why is RoseHosting’s Fully Managed Drupal Hosting Support Good for You?
RoseHosting will handle all of the technical details in running your own Drupal server. Our expert Linux system administrators can help you set up and install the latest Drupal CMS and have you up and running in mere minutes. On top of this, we offer full root access to your server, without compromising on the support experience.
We provide you with total control over your Fully Managed Drupal server. Our hosting experts will also take care of any issues that arise, so you can have the best hosting experience. Rest assured that you will experience the fastest and most reliable managed Drupal hosting with us.
Our Drupal VPS hosting features include the following:
- Drupal security features and tuning
- Latest-generation Intel Xeon processors
- DDR4 RAM and Enterprise-grade NVMe storage
- Automatic OS updates, and package installation on request
- Hand-tailored Drupal optimization of eligible services for improved performance and capacity
- Dedicated resources for your applications
- Experienced Drupal technical support
- Installation/configuration of any additional software
- Migration of an unlimited number of data and websites from the previous Drupal hosting provider
- Diagnosis of failed services
Otherwise, if you want to spend a lot of time going through tutorials, reviews, and videos, we recommend you first check out our guides on how to install Drupal on Ubuntu 22.04 or CentOS 8.
Bringing it all Together
Drupal is definitely the most powerful content management system for boosting up websites, but still not favorable to those who just stepped into the web hosting world.
Why?
Because running a Drupal hosting website by yourself can be pretty complicated. If you allow us a little digression here, we would say – if it’s the best option, it won’t be easy.
That’s where we come in – RoseHosting can be your ”quick and easy install” solution.
Q&A
What is Drupal?
Drupal is an open-source content management system offering a wide variety of additional themes, modules, libraries, and installation profiles to make your website’s performance perfect. Drupal CMS is updated frequently with new security updates and quality-of-life changes. Considering its multi-language support, user-friendly interface, automated JavaScript testing, drag-and-drop interfaces, quick edit tools, scalability, and reliability, Drupal is everything you need to start building your website right out of the box.
What is Drupal hosting?
Drupal hosting stands for a web hosting plan provided by a web hosting service that powers Drupal CMS and finally makes the Drupal website visible. While Drupal is a content management system (CMS), hosting is an additional puzzle that makes this system alive and accessible to visitors on the web.
Where can I host a Drupal site?
You can host a Drupal site on shared, cloud, and dedicated servers. All you have to do is to choose the best hosting service that will provide you with fully-managed support and the fastest Drupal hosting performance.
WordPress vs Drupal: Which one is better?
While WordPress is still the most desirable content management system, Drupal is pretty well-known for its security features, focusing more on enterprise sites. It is not easy to declare differences between Drupal and WordPress and make an unbiased conclusion because each CMS specifically suits different websites. Drupal is a better choice for those (mainly developers) who want more complex websites with comprehensive data organization, while WordPress is more suitable for those (mainly non-developers) who need a user-friendly website.