drupal

I just ate at Cocì and realized I'm sitting next to Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. The world is a small place sometimes.

Remember, even the greatest humans of all time were just people. You can be great, too, if you work. And with a little luck at the right time, you can be amazing.

AN Hosting recently relocated to a Seattle datacenter. As part of this process, my site is now running on a much more modern server (AMD Opteron 6100-series Magny Cours vs. Intel Xeon 5400-series Harpertown).

Unfortunately, a new server and new install can mean software changes. AN Hosting has tightened up the security settings on PHP. Better security is always a good thing, but it means the Drupal command line utility drush no longer works out of the box. (For those that don't know drush - please give it a chance. It provides near foolproof Drupal core/module/theme upgrades as well as command-line control of your Drupal sites.)   read more >>

I have been using AN Hosting since November 2010 to host this Drupal site. Finding a responsible shared hosting provider was certainly not an easy task. There are a staggering number of hosts available, along with a huge number of rather questionable "review" websites. I was forced to come up with a list of hosting providers that seemed decent and then individually research them one-by-one. I'm hoping that my experience and real-world performance/uptime report will be useful to others.

This post was last updated 2011-11-20   read more >>

I've now been using Drupal on 6by9.net for a year. The flexibility and variety of add-on modules has been great, but there is a definite learning curve. I would not expect casual users to have any fun at all, and the management interface is fairly daunting. Once you dive below the user interface, adding/modifying/updating modules or Drupal itself, the headaches can really begin.

So, even though I'm a highly technical user/administrator, I'm quite ambivalent. Using Drupal has been great. Administering Drupal has been demanding.

Updating modules is a painless process. You unpack the new tar and run an update script. I haven't had any serious bugs, although the last update did raise a couple errors I had to double check (just to make sure they weren't critical).

Updating to new versions of Drupal is serious work. You have to replace the entire site directory with the new version and then pull in the changes you have made (modules, themes, files, settings file, etc). I haven't found a great way to automate this, yet, although I certainly would if my site were larger.   read more >>