The best Drupal hosting in 2026 needs PHP 8.3 or newer, real SSH access, and a working system cron — and a surprising number of hosts marketed for Drupal quietly fail one of the three. We compared 10 providers on price, PHP version, Composer access and cron to find which ones actually fit Drupal 11.
A2 Hosting’s Drupal landing page still advertises PHP 5.6 through 8.1. SiteGround’s Drupal page no longer mentions Drupal anywhere in its body copy, and its Drupal documentation last changed in July 2023.
That gap tells you something important before you compare a single price. Much of the shared hosting industry stopped maintaining its Drupal offering while Drupal itself moved on. The $1.99 plan with a Drupal logo on it is often a plan that cannot run current Drupal properly.
Here is the catch nobody puts in the comparison table: Drupal needs SSH access, Composer, and a real system cron. Strip any one of those away and you own a site you cannot update. Hostinger’s entry Drupal plan has no SSH and no SFTP at all, which means no Composer and no Drush. You can install Drupal on it. You cannot maintain Drupal on it.
This guide ranks 10 providers on what Drupal actually needs. We verified every price on the provider’s own page in September 2026, flagged the ones that are sales-gated, and said plainly where each option falls down. If you are still deciding between hosting models generally, our guide to shared hosting, VPS, or cloud hosting covers that layer of the decision.
Quick summary: which Drupal host should you pick?
| If you want to… | Use this | Best for | Setup time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deploy Drupal CMS in one click and own the server | xCloud | Agencies, freelancers, site owners | Under 5 minutes |
| Buy the deepest Drupal expertise money can buy | Acquia | Enterprise, government, regulated | Weeks (sales cycle) |
| Get a polished Dev/Test/Live workflow | Pantheon | Editorial teams, higher education | Hours |
| Run git-driven, reproducible environments | Upsun | Developer teams, multi-stack shops | Hours |
| Avoid vendor lock-in on Kubernetes | amazee.io | Enterprise with in-house DevOps | Days |
| Manage many sites on one cheap server | Cloudways | Multi-site operators | 30 minutes |
| Start from a current Drupal 11 image | DigitalOcean | Developers comfortable with servers | 30 minutes |
| Get the most RAM per euro | Hetzner | Budget-conscious technical teams | Hours (DIY) |
Best for most people: xCloud, because it gives you a one-click Drupal CMS install on a server you keep control of, at a price that does not scale with your traffic.
Best if budget is no object: Acquia, which remains the most Drupal-native platform in existence and is priced accordingly.
Best free starting point: Pantheon’s Sandbox tier, which costs nothing for two non-production sites.
Why Drupal hosting is different from WordPress hosting
WordPress runs almost anywhere. Drupal does not, and the reasons are specific rather than snobbish.
| Requirement | Why it matters for Drupal |
|---|---|
| PHP 8.3 or newer | Drupal 11 will not run on older versions. Many shared plans still default lower. |
| SSH access | Without it you cannot run Composer or Drush, which is how Drupal installs and updates. |
| Composer | Drupal is a Composer project. Modules, core updates, and the lockfile all depend on it. |
| Real system cron | Drupal’s default page-triggered cron runs erratically on low-traffic sites. |
| 2 GB RAM minimum | 4 GB or more in practice once the database and Composer share the box. |
| Database you control | Search indexing and entity queries hit the database harder than a typical blog. |
If you only remember one line: a Drupal host without SSH and Composer is not a Drupal host, whatever the marketing page says.
Cron deserves a second mention because it fails quietly. Drupal ships with cron that fires when a visitor loads a page, so a site with modest traffic runs its scheduled tasks unpredictably or not at all. Search stops indexing, caches stop clearing, and nobody notices for a month. Our guide to scheduling tasks with cron jobs explains how to set up the real thing.
The four categories you are actually choosing between
| Category | What you get | What it costs you | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drupal-native platform | Drupal-specific tooling, workflow, and support staff who know Drupal | The highest prices in hosting, often sales-gated | Acquia, Pantheon, amazee.io |
| Managed control panel | One-click deploys, managed stack, your own server underneath | A monthly platform fee on top of the server | xCloud, Cloudways |
| General PaaS | Git-driven environments, strong developer workflow | Per-user fees and resource metering | Upsun |
| Raw VPS | Total control and the lowest sticker price | Every hour of setup and maintenance is yours | DigitalOcean, Hetzner |
Most comparison posts pit these against each other as if they were the same product. They are not. A $5 Hetzner box and a $500 Pantheon account solve different problems, and the right question is which problem you have.
How we ranked these
- Does it meet Drupal 11’s requirements? PHP 8.3+, SSH, Composer, real cron. This alone pushed several popular names down the list.
- Is Drupal actively supported or quietly abandoned? We checked when each Drupal page and doc set last changed.
- Is the pricing honest? We separated promotional rates from renewals and flagged everything sales-gated.
- What is the real total cost? Platform fee plus server plus your hours. The third line is the one people forget.
- How fast do you get a working site? Sign-up to a live Drupal install on HTTPS.
- Can you leave? Lock-in matters more on a CMS you may run for a decade.
All prices were verified on each provider’s own pricing page on 28 September 2026. Where a provider publishes no price, we say so rather than quoting a third-party estimate.
Master comparison table
| Rank | Provider | Category | Starting price | Setup time | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 1 | xCloud | Managed control panel | $24.99/mo VPS, or $5/server BYO | Under 5 min | One-click Drupal with server control |
| 🥈 2 | Acquia | Drupal-native platform | Not published | Weeks | Enterprise and regulated sectors |
| 🥉 3 | Pantheon | Drupal-native platform | $41/mo annual, free sandbox | Hours | Editorial workflow |
| 4 | Upsun | General PaaS | €22/mo first production plan | Hours | Git-driven dev teams |
| 5 | amazee.io | Drupal-native platform | $199/mo | Days | Open-source Kubernetes |
| 6 | Cloudways | Managed control panel | $11/mo | 30 min | Many sites, one server |
| 7 | DigitalOcean | Raw VPS | $4/mo (realistically $24) | 30 min | Current Drupal 11 image |
| 8 | Hetzner | Raw VPS | €5.49/mo | Hours | Best specs per euro |
| 9 | Hostinger | Shared | $1.99/mo promotional | Minutes | Evaluation only |
| 10 | SiteGround | Shared | $2.99/mo, renews $17.99 | Minutes | Legacy Drupal sites |
🥇 1. xCloud: best for one-click Drupal CMS on infrastructure you control
xCloud deploys the official Drupal CMS image in about five minutes, on a server that stays yours. That combination is the gap in this market. The Drupal-native platforms give you great tooling on infrastructure you rent by the visit, and the raw VPS providers give you control plus a weekend of setup work. xCloud Drupal CMS hosting sits in between.
The template handles the pieces that usually eat an afternoon: a pinned Drupal CMS image behind an Nginx gateway, a private MariaDB database, a correctly generated hash salt, an administrator account, a dedicated cron process, persistent volumes, and a free SSL certificate on your domain.
Key features
- One-click deployment from the OneClick app catalog, with every secret generated automatically
- Dedicated cron every five minutes, running independently of visitor traffic rather than on page load
- Private MariaDB database with no host port, reachable only on the internal network
- Persistent volumes for your Composer project, uploaded media, and database, all surviving restarts
- Bring your own server at $5 per server per month on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner, Linode, AWS, or bare metal
- No traffic or site limits, so your bill does not move when a post does well
How to deploy Drupal CMS on xCloud
- Sign up and pick Drupal CMS from the OneClick catalog.
- Choose a Docker and Nginx server, either a new Cloud VPS or one you already connected.
- Enter your site details, pick Demo or Go Live domain mode, and confirm the administrator email.
- Wait for provisioning, then sign in with the generated password from your Credentials panel.
- Change that password, configure outbound mail, and start building in Canvas.
The full walkthrough lives in How to deploy Drupal CMS with xCloud.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Live Drupal CMS site in under five minutes | ❌ No Drupal-specific support tier the way Acquia and Pantheon have |
| ✅ Dedicated cron configured correctly by default | ❌ No automatic Drupal core updates, upgrades stay a manual operator flow |
| ✅ Private database, not exposed to the internet | ❌ $24.99 entry VPS costs more than a raw $5 box |
| ✅ Bring your own VPS for $5 per server per month | ❌ No Multidev-style environment branching out of the box |
| ✅ No lock-in, unused balance refunded on deletion | ❌ Newer platform than Acquia or Pantheon, smaller Drupal community footprint |
Best for: agencies, freelancers, and site owners who want Drupal running today on infrastructure they own, and who are comfortable running their own upgrades.
🥈 2. Acquia: best for enterprise Drupal with the deepest expertise
Acquia was founded by Dries Buytaert, who created Drupal. No other host has that relationship with the project, and it shows in the tooling: Cloud IDE, Acquia Search, automated codebase management, and support staff who work on Drupal itself. The Acquia Cloud Platform sits inside a wider experience stack covering customer data, site building, and campaigns, and for a regulated enterprise that integration is the product.
Plans are tiered as Professional, Business, and Elite, with uptime SLAs up to 99.99 percent on higher tiers and compliance configurations covering FedRAMP and HIPAA. Support runs 24/7/365 from engineers who specialize in Drupal.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ The deepest Drupal expertise available anywhere | ❌ Publishes no pricing at all, every deal is sales-gated |
| ✅ Enterprise compliance and SLA coverage | ❌ Widely regarded as the most expensive Drupal host |
| ✅ Tooling built specifically for Drupal workflows | ❌ Enterprise contracting makes it impractical below a certain budget |
| ✅ Direct line to the people who maintain Drupal core | ❌ Long onboarding compared to self-service platforms |
Best for: enterprises, government agencies, and regulated organizations where Drupal expertise and compliance matter more than the invoice.
🥉 3. Pantheon: best for Drupal WebOps workflow
Pantheon supports exactly two CMSes, Drupal and WordPress, and the focus shows. Every site gets Dev, Test, and Live environments with a git-based workflow between them, which is the pattern most editorial teams eventually want.
Pricing is refreshingly public: Basic at $41 per month on annual billing, with Performance tiers from $160 to $916 and beyond, plus a free Sandbox tier for two non-production sites.
Every site ships with Dev, Test, and Live environments, plus Multidev branching for feature work. Basic includes a global CDN, nightly backups, New Relic monitoring, and Solr search, and compliance covers SOC 2, GDPR, and FERPA.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Genuinely public per-tier pricing with stated limits | ❌ Hard visit caps, with overage exposure on monthly billing |
| ✅ Excellent multi-environment workflow | ❌ The best features sit behind a $500/mo Gold account tier on top of site cost |
| ✅ Free sandbox makes evaluation risk-free | ❌ Opinionated platform, no arbitrary server configuration |
| ✅ Strong compliance story at standard tiers | ❌ Restricted filesystem limits some modules |
Best for: editorial teams and universities that want a disciplined deployment workflow and will use the environment tooling enough to justify the account tier.
4. Upsun (formerly Platform.sh): best for git-driven environments
Note the name change. Platform.sh rebranded to Upsun, and platform.sh now redirects. The legacy plan structure survives as Upsun Fixed, while Upsun Flex is the newer usage-based product. Any guide still calling it Platform.sh is out of date.
The appeal is reproducibility. Every branch clones the production environment byte for byte, including data, so your staging environment is not an approximation.
Upsun Fixed starts at €12.25 per month for development and €22.00 for the first production plan. Upsun Flex bills €9.00 per project plus metered CPU, memory, and disk. Both include official Drupal guides and deploy templates, and there is a 15-day trial with no card required.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Cheapest transparent entry of the platform tier | ❌ Prices are in euros, so dollar cost moves with exchange rates |
| ✅ Reproducible environments with real data | ❌ Entry plans are small at 0.65 vCPU and 5 GB disk |
| ✅ Works for more than Drupal if you run a mixed stack | ❌ Per-user fees of €10 to €11 penalize larger teams |
| ✅ Public per-resource rates | ❌ YAML configuration has a steeper learning curve |
Best for: developer teams who live in git and want staging environments that genuinely match production.
5. amazee.io: best for open-source Kubernetes without lock-in
amazee.io runs on Lagoon, which is open source. That single fact separates it from every other platform here, because you can in principle run the same stack yourself if the relationship ends. The company is now part of Mirantis.
Pricing starts at $199 per month for Cloud Basic, covering 300,000 hits, 5 GB storage, and one production plus two development environments. Cloud Professional starts at $399.
Local development runs on Docker Compose against the same stack as production, and you can deploy across AWS, GCP, or dedicated infrastructure. Billing meters hits rather than visits, and uptime guarantees run from 99.9 to 99.99 percent depending on tier.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ No true vendor lock-in, the platform is open source | ❌ Highest entry price here at $199/mo |
| ✅ Real local-to-production parity through Docker | ❌ 5 GB storage at the entry tier is tight |
| ✅ Flexible cloud provider choice | ❌ Hit-based billing is harder to forecast than flat pricing |
| ✅ Enterprise SLAs available | ❌ Smaller community than Acquia or Pantheon |
Best for: enterprises with in-house DevOps who want Kubernetes-backed Drupal and refuse to be locked in.
6. Cloudways: best for running many sites on one server
Cloudways gives you SSH, preinstalled Composer, and real cron, which clears the Drupal bar. Its Flexible plan starts at $11 per month on a DigitalOcean 2 GB droplet, and you can host unlimited applications on that one server rather than paying per site.
The honest caveat is that Cloudways is a WordPress-first platform. Drupal works well on it, but nothing about the tooling is Drupal-aware. We cover the platform difference in more detail on our xCloud vs Cloudways comparison.
PHP switches per server and per application up to 8.4, SSL and migration are included, billing is pay-as-you-go with no contract, and you choose the cloud provider underneath.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Meets every technical Drupal requirement | ❌ No Drupal auto-updater or Drupal-aware support |
| ✅ No per-site pricing, host many Drupal sites on one box | ❌ 2 GB entry server can run out of memory during composer update |
| ✅ Flexible PHP versions per application | ❌ You pay a markup over the raw droplet for WordPress-centric tooling |
| ✅ No lock-in contract | ❌ Drupal deployment is entirely do-it-yourself |
Best for: operators running several Drupal sites who want managed infrastructure without per-site pricing.
7. DigitalOcean: best current Drupal 11 marketplace image
DigitalOcean has no managed Drupal product, but its Marketplace image is more current than most shared hosts. The OpenLiteSpeed Drupal image ships Drupal 11.3.9 on PHP 8.4 with MariaDB 11.4, Drush 13.6, and CertBot, plus a first-login script that handles your domain and Let’s Encrypt certificate.
Ignore the $4 headline price. That droplet has 512 MiB of RAM, and DigitalOcean’s own Drupal documentation uses a 4 GB droplet in its example. Budget around $24 per month for something usable.
You get full root access, so crontab, Composer, Drush, and Redis all work normally. Pricing is flat with no renewal cliff, snapshots and volumes are paid add-ons, and the community tutorial library for Drupal server setup is extensive.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Marketplace image ships Drupal 11 on PHP 8.4 | ❌ The $4 droplet cannot run Drupal, realistic entry is about $24 |
| ✅ No promotional pricing games | ❌ You own all patching, backups, and security work |
| ✅ Complete server control | ❌ No Drupal support staff, images are partner-maintained |
| ✅ Easy to attach to a control panel later | ❌ Nothing is managed unless you manage it |
Best for: developers who want a current Drupal image and are comfortable owning the server afterward.
8. Hetzner: best raw specs per euro
Hetzner still offers the best hardware per euro here, though less dramatically than it used to. The CX23 gives you 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, and 20 TB of traffic for €5.49 per month, which is a genuinely workable Drupal 11 box rather than a technicality.
Watch the 2026 pricing history, though. Hetzner raised cloud prices twice this year, in April and again on 15 June. CX and CAX rose roughly 30 to 38 percent, while CPX rose 144 to 175 percent and CCX 113 to 173 percent. The “four times cheaper than everyone” reputation is weaker than it was.
Billing runs hourly with a monthly cap, Arm-based CAX instances improve price to performance on some workloads, and root access comes with no platform restrictions. Data centres sit mainly in Europe, with US and Singapore locations available.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Best specs per euro of anything here | ❌ Zero Drupal tooling, you build the entire stack |
| ✅ Generous included traffic | ❌ Support is infrastructure-only, no application help |
| ✅ Full root control | ❌ Two significant price increases during 2026 |
| ✅ Cheap enough to over-provision | ❌ Limited geographic footprint for some audiences |
Best for: technical teams who want maximum hardware for the money and will happily connect it to a control panel rather than configure everything by hand.
9. Hostinger: cheapest entry, with a serious caveat
Hostinger’s Drupal page advertises the Single plan at $1.99 per month with a one-click Drupal installer. For evaluation, that is fine. For a site you intend to maintain, read the next paragraph carefully.
Hostinger’s own support documentation states that SSH and SFTP require Web Premium or above. The Single plan has neither, which means no Composer and no Drush. You can install Drupal. You cannot update it the way Drupal expects to be updated.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Cheapest verified entry point here | ❌ No SSH or SFTP on the entry plan, so no Composer or Drush |
| ✅ Genuine one-click Drupal installer | ❌ The $1.99 rate requires a 48-month prepayment |
| ✅ Git integration in the control panel | ❌ Verified renewals roughly triple the promotional rate |
| ✅ Fine for a throwaway evaluation site | ❌ 1 GB RAM and 20 PHP workers are thin for authenticated Drupal traffic |
Best for: clicking around Drupal for a week before committing. Not for a production site.
10. SiteGround: workable, but Drupal is clearly deprioritized
SiteGround supports Drupal technically, offering SSH access and documented Drush support. The performance stack and uptime reputation are both good, and multiple PHP versions are selectable.
The concern is direction rather than capability. SiteGround’s Drupal landing page now contains no Drupal-specific copy at all, describing generic hosting that “supports most popular CMS platforms,” and its Drupal tutorial hub last changed in July 2023. Pricing starts at $2.99 promotional and renews at $17.99, the steepest multiple in this comparison.
Pros and cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ SSH available and Drush officially documented | ❌ Drupal landing page contains no Drupal content |
| ✅ Strong performance and CDN stack | ❌ Drupal documentation untouched since July 2023 |
| ✅ Good uptime reputation | ❌ 10,000 monthly visit cap on the entry plan |
| ✅ Daily backups included | ❌ $2.99 renews at $17.99, a six times increase |
Best for: existing SiteGround customers with a legacy Drupal site who do not want to move.
Cost breakdown: what you will actually pay
Sticker price is the smallest part of this. Here is the fuller picture for a single production Drupal site in year one.
| Provider | Platform cost | Server cost | Your setup time | Realistic year one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| xCloud (Cloud VPS) | Included | $24.99/mo | Under 1 hour | ~$300 |
| xCloud (bring your own) | $5/server/mo | Your provider’s rate | 1 to 2 hours | ~$130 plus server |
| Acquia | Not published | Included | Weeks, including procurement | Enterprise budget |
| Pantheon Basic | $41/mo annual | Included | 2 to 4 hours | ~$492 |
| Pantheon with Gold | $541/mo | Included | 2 to 4 hours | ~$6,500 |
| Upsun Fixed Essential | €22/mo | Included | 4 to 8 hours | ~€264 |
| amazee.io Cloud Basic | $199/mo | Included | Days | ~$2,388 |
| Cloudways | Included | $11/mo | 2 to 4 hours | ~$132 |
| DigitalOcean 4 GB | None | ~$24/mo | 4 to 8 hours | ~$288 plus your time |
| Hetzner CX23 | None | €5.49/mo | 8 to 16 hours | ~€66 plus a lot of your time |
The line item people forget is the last column. A Hetzner box at €66 a year looks unbeatable until you price sixteen hours of your own setup work plus the occasional 3 a.m. restart. If your hourly rate is meaningful, the cheapest option on paper often is not.
Common mistakes when choosing Drupal hosting
- Buying a shared plan because it has a Drupal logo. Check for SSH and Composer before anything else. The logo means nothing on its own.
- Comparing promotional rates to flat rates. A $2.99 plan that renews at $17.99 is a $17.99 plan with a discount attached. Compare renewals.
- Ignoring the visit cap. Platform pricing that looks cheap at 35,000 visits becomes expensive the month a post takes off.
- Underestimating memory. Drupal plus MariaDB plus Composer on a 1 GB box will fail during updates, which is exactly when you need it not to.
- Forgetting cron until something breaks. Page-triggered cron is the default and it is wrong for most sites. Configure a real one on day one.
Which Drupal host fits you?
| If you are… | Best choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A freelancer with client sites | xCloud | One-click deploys, $5 per server, no per-site fees |
| An agency running 10+ Drupal sites | xCloud or Cloudways | Per-server pricing beats per-site pricing at scale |
| A university web team | Pantheon | Environment workflow suits multi-editor institutions |
| A government agency | Acquia | Compliance posture and Drupal-specific support |
| A developer team using git heavily | Upsun | Reproducible environments per branch |
| An enterprise avoiding lock-in | amazee.io | Lagoon is open source |
| A technical solo operator on a budget | Hetzner plus a control panel | Best hardware per euro, managed layer on top |
| Someone evaluating Drupal this week | Pantheon Sandbox | Free, no card, two non-production sites |
Deploy Drupal CMS on xCloud in under five minutes
If you landed here because you want a Drupal site running rather than a hosting philosophy, this is the shortest path.
xCloud Drupal CMS hosting deploys the official Drupal CMS image with the private database, dedicated cron, persistent volumes, and HTTPS already handled. A dedicated Cloud VPS sized for Drupal starts at $24.99 per month. If you already own a server anywhere, bring it across for $5 per server per month instead.
What you get without configuring it yourself:
- Drupal CMS deployed from a digest-pinned image behind an Nginx gateway
- A private MariaDB database with generated credentials and no public port
- A dedicated cron process running every five minutes on its own timer
- Persistent volumes for code, files, and database that survive restarts
- A free SSL certificate, issued and renewed automatically
- Server backups and snapshots covering all three volumes
- Staging environments for testing updates before they reach production
Already running Drupal elsewhere? Free migration moves it across.
The honest trade-off: xCloud does not auto-upgrade your Drupal core, and it does not staff a Drupal-specialist support desk the way Acquia does. Upgrades stay a deliberate operation where you back up, update the Composer project, run drush updatedb, and verify. For most teams that is the correct behavior, because surprise CMS updates break custom modules at the worst possible time. If you need someone else to own your Drupal upgrades entirely, Acquia is the honest answer and it will cost accordingly.
Deploy Drupal CMS on xCloud and have a live site before your coffee goes cold.
Your 2026 Drupal hosting roadmap
The Drupal hosting market split into two halves this year. The Drupal-native platforms went further upmarket, and the shared hosts quietly stopped maintaining their Drupal offerings. What is left in the middle is the interesting part: control panels and VPS providers where you get current PHP, real Composer access, and a price that does not move with your traffic.
| Your goal | Expert pick |
|---|---|
| Live Drupal site today | xCloud |
| Deepest Drupal expertise | Acquia |
| Best editorial workflow | Pantheon |
| Free evaluation | Pantheon Sandbox |
| Lowest real cost with technical skill | Hetzner plus a control panel |
| No vendor lock-in | amazee.io |
What to do this week: open a candidate’s plan page and check three things before you look at the price. Does it give you SSH? Does it run PHP 8.3 or newer? Can you configure a real system cron? Any plan that fails one of those will cost you far more in maintenance pain than it saves in monthly fees.
Whichever direction you go, that check is the move worth making.
If you have found this blog helpful, feel free to subscribe to our blogs for valuable tutorials, guides, knowledge, and tips on web hosting and server management.
If you run into any issues deploying Drupal on xCloud, feel free to reach out to our support team.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Drupal hosting provider in 2026?
For most teams, xCloud, because it deploys Drupal CMS in one click onto a server you control, with no per-site or per-visit pricing. If you need enterprise compliance and Drupal-specialist support staff, Acquia is the stronger choice and prices accordingly. If you want a polished Dev, Test, and Live workflow, Pantheon is worth its higher cost.
Can I run Drupal on cheap shared hosting?
Technically yes, practically no. Drupal is a Composer project, so you need SSH access to install modules and run updates, and several budget plans do not provide it at the entry tier. Check for SSH, PHP 8.3 or newer, and real cron before you buy anything.
How much does Drupal hosting cost?
The software is free under the GPL, so you pay only for infrastructure. A workable VPS runs from about €5.49 to $25 per month, managed control panels add roughly $5 to $11 on top, and the Drupal-native platforms start at $41 and rise steeply from there. Acquia does not publish pricing at all.
Is free Drupal hosting worth it?
Only for evaluation. Pantheon’s Sandbox tier is the best free option because it costs nothing for two non-production sites and is backed by a real platform. Free plans elsewhere tend to lack the SSH access and cron control that a live Drupal site needs.
What PHP version does Drupal 11 need?
PHP 8.3 at minimum, with 8.4 and 8.5 also supported depending on your Drupal minor version. This matters when you shop, because several hosts still advertise PHP 8.1 or lower on their Drupal pages.
Do I need managed Drupal hosting, or can I self-host?
You can absolutely self-host, and plenty of teams do it well. The question is whether you want to own stack configuration, security patching, backups, and cron. Our guide to self-managed versus managed hosting walks through the trade-off in detail.
Is Pantheon or Acquia better for Drupal?
Acquia has deeper Drupal expertise and a stronger compliance story, making it the enterprise answer. Pantheon has better self-service pricing and a workflow that mid-sized editorial teams find easier to adopt. Budget usually decides this before features do.
What happened to Platform.sh?
Platform.sh rebranded to Upsun, and the old domain now redirects. The previous plan structure continues as Upsun Fixed, while Upsun Flex is the newer usage-based option. Any comparison still listing Platform.sh as a separate product is out of date.
Can I move my existing Drupal site to a new host?
Yes, and it is more routine than it sounds. You need your database, your Composer project including the lockfile, and your files directory, all captured from the same point in time. xCloud offers free migration if you want someone else to handle the move.
I installed Drupal but my scheduled tasks never run. What went wrong?
Almost certainly cron. Drupal’s default fires when a visitor loads a page, so a low-traffic site runs scheduled tasks erratically or not at all. Set up a real system cron calling drush cron on a timer, which is what xCloud configures automatically every five minutes.