Guest post by Jason Burnett

Drupal has emerged as one of the world's most durable, feature-rich and customizable open-source website content management systems. It has proven itself in one high-profile application after another, from WhiteHouse.gov to HarvardMagazine.com to BieberFever.com. So how do you ensure that your Drupal-powered site has an equally robust hosting infrastructure--one that can withstand the slings and arrows of even the most demanding deployments?

Reliable, high-performance hosting begins with good planning. Believe it or not, one of the most common mistakes is also one of the most obvious: Not anticipating a surge in demand. Whether you're the site owner, developer or hosting provider, it's critical to consider this factor. Commercial sites, for example, will experience upticks with every sales promotion, publicity event, or shift in user base. If your hosting environment isn't capable of scaling quickly to accommodate these changes, you risk frustrating users and incurring potential losses in revenue.

Security is another issue. Drupal's very popularity has made it a big target for those who are seeking either information or publicity. Mean-spirited visitors will sometimes attempt to deface or disrupt sites they can't access. Others will attack sites carrying messages they disagree with--and of course criminals will attempt to penetrate any site that deals in credit cards, social security numbers or other confidential information. To counter these assaults, your hosting infrastructure should go beyond standard firewalls and port filtering, to include firewall rule sets such as Access Control Lists. Web application firewalls are another way to prevent specialized attacks like SQL injection, remote command execution or cross-site scripting.

All of these protective measures will ensure that your Drupal site remains active and secure. Overall performance for your site, however, depends on how well your infrastructure is optimized for Drupal's unique characteristics. To ensure efficient operation, your provider should go beyond the typical Apache-PHP-MySQL solutions.

For example, Drupal response times are directly linked to effective data caching. Varnish, an open-source product, is a reverse proxy cache that will increase your data availability. As a supplement for Apache servers, Varnish is custom-designed to cache content based on HTTP headers. APC (Alternative PHP Cache) and Memcached are other enhancements that can reduce external data calls and speed site responsiveness. If your hosting service provider has such add-ons, it will help you avoid site slowdowns.

To improve your Drupal site's search capabilities, ask your provider if they use Solr, a platform for Drupal search, which is faster than Drupal's native search.

Performance will be further increased by load-balanced application servers. To ensure that your Drupal databases aren't adversely impacted, it's a good idea for the system to also employ some form of replication and failover at the database layer. Such customized improvements, while seemingly technical in nature, have a big impact on the durability and scalability of your Drupal site.

Finally, before your Drupal site is deployed--and periodically thereafter--ask your provider to load-test your site to make sure it can handle anticipated traffic. A reputable hosting partner will also be there for you with 24/7 monitoring and fast response to alerts when issues come up. Together, these steps will create the kind of strong, fast and reliable site that makes all of Drupal's content management benefits a plus for you and your customers.

Jason Burnett is Director of Infrastructure for NeoSpire (www.neospire.net), a premier Dallas-based Managed Hosting Services company. He can be reached at jason@neospire.net.

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