You guys Drupal Friendly?

[Godmode]

Hi guys,

I heard a lot of about you guys at WHT and other forums. I am happy to see a host who doesnt oversell and i dont want to name those who do.

OK now straight to the point.

I am from Singapore and business level user. I have little or no knowledge about PHP/mySQL or anything remotely related to programming. Well, so am planning to launch a community based site on drupal. I expect the site to grow in huge numbers and get some good traffic in 1-3 months.

Wondering if futurequest can take this load on shared hosting package. I dont want to jump to dedicated hosting right a way. Just need to ensure my site is getting popular before investing that money.

So i have a few questions specifically related to Drupal.

Do you guys do/provide the following


support for Drupal 5.X ( would be going with 5.2)
.htaccess for clean URLs
LOCK TABLE or CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE permission
mod_rewrite enabled
should have cron enabled
PHP as apache and not CGI/Fast CGI
Do you have any PHP memory limit? Drupal needs atleast 36-64MB to run smoothly if i am not wrong.


The site is expected to get about 50-100 concurrent users. However i dont expect concurrent DB connections anything beyond 20-30 at any time, since all anonymous users would be on cache mode.

My other concer is bandwidth. It seems you guys gives limited bandwidth compared to other host.

I could be totally wrong in understanding how BW is allocated by other hosts but am not sure if i get about 100-200K page views per month is 5 GB or 10 GB bandwidth sufficient?

I hope i am not expecting too much. Looking for honest answers from futurequest team and other drupal website owners who know the real life scenario with drupal sites on futurequest.

[sheila]

We do have some clients running Drupal on our Community Servers. It is a very resource-intensive web application, and for busy sites would need to be run on a dedicated server (depending on what modules and so forth you choose to use).

It's very difficult to say without seeing a given site in action whether it can successfully run Drupal (or any web app) on a Community Server. That said, we do offer a 60-day Satisfaction Guarantee (http://www.FutureQuest.net/Services/Guarantee/). You would be welcome to try out your site at FutureQuest and see if it will work out. We do offer managed, dedicated servers also, if your site starts out on a shared server, but then outgrows it and needs to go dedicated.

Based on the requirements listed for Drupal (http://drupal.org/requirements), it appears that we do meet them.

.htaccess and mod_rewrite are both available. We do caution against rewriting URLs that hide the fact that the site is producing dynamic content by making the URLs look like static content. This can lead to server overloads when spiders and bots crawl a site too rapidly due to believing that the site is static content only.

cron is available, and I believe that both LOCK TABLE and CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE are available.

FutureQuest does not provide CPanel nor Fantastico. We have our own in-house developed control panel which we call the CNC or Command'N'Control. More info available here:
http://www.FutureQuest.net/Services/CNC/

PHP is offered as an Apache module, as well as being available as CGI. (Most people are using the Apache module, of course.)

PHP does have memory limits, as explained in the following Knowledgebase article:
http://service.FutureQuest.net/kb180

As far as the amount of bandwidth required for 100-200K page views... that would depend on the total file size of each page (including images), plus on how much caching might be in use. Depending on how your site is coded, it is possible that some files/images could be cached and not need to be resent to the browser with each request.

FutureQuest provisions high quality bandwidth from multiple providers (for redundancy), and this is one of our highest operating expenses.

[Godmode]

Thanks for answering my questions. I am satisfied with your answers and almost ready to signup.

A quick question, Its not very clear on your site, how many websites can i host with Visionary package? Is it only 1?

almost forgot to ask, do you accept paypal?

[sheila]

You can host multiple domains on a single full hosting package. However, the additional domains do not include all of the features of a full hosting package.

You can have up to 5 IRM (Internally Redirected-Mapping) packages and up to 10 IRO (Internally Redirected-Overlay) packages on a single full package. Full details about the IRM/IRO hosting packages are given here:
http://www.FutureQuest.net/Services/IR/

Please review the limitations on the IRM/IRO packages so that you can determine whether those packages will meet your needs.

Of course, if you have questions, just let us know.

[Godmode]

I understand i need to pay for those extra domains.

Service Name One time fee
Domain Parking $25.00
External Redirection (ER) $25.00
Internal Redirection (IRM/IRO) (see explanation) $25.00
Subdomain (DS-IRM/IRO) (see explanation) $25.00
Externally Redirected Subdomain (DS-ER) (see explanation) $25.00

do you guys accept paypal?

[sheila]

Yes, there is a one-time setup fee for extra domains.

Unfortunately, we do not accept Paypal. We had some bad experiences with Paypal a few years back, and stopped accepting Paypal payments at that time.

Our list of payment options are given here:
http://www.FutureQuest.net/Billing/Payment/

[Godmode]

OK great. Let me get a domain name registered at namecheap and am good to go.

Thanks for all the help and i hope you guys would continue to support me in future.

[sheila]

Sounds good. We look forward to hosting your site. :)
Support is available 24/7 through email and the forums. Coding and script installation issues are supported in these forums. The nice thing about the forums is that site owners who are actually using the same tools on their site can also offer tips and suggestions. :yeah:
We have a very active and helpful community.