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Over on Hosting for Your Drupal Creations, I lay out the good and the bad of my experiences hosting Drupal on DreamHost. Some updates:

One-Click Install for Drupal

I updated the hosting article to reflect that DreamHost now includes Drupal among its many one-click installation options, which include other content management systems, wiki platforms, photo gallery platforms, and more. As of this writing, the DreamHost one-click option will perform a "simple installation" of Drupal 6.20, handing you a ready-for-dev setup. 

Is that a good thing? No doubt so, if you want a quick Drupal installation to play around with, or to get a simple site up and running fast. But if you're serious about using Drupal, the option probably means nothing; you'll learn much more about Drupal by installing it yourself, and will have more freedom in building the site you want. As the installer itself notes,

Simple One-Clicks are automatically updated and provide a selection of themes and plugins. Customization options are very limited.

I haven't used this one-click Drupal yet, but have heard tales from other users about the limitations on customization and configuration imposed by one-click installations, of whatever type on whatever hosting service. You may not run into such a limitation – or then again, you may do so just as you go to make a crucial enhancement to an active site. Why not avoid that risk and install Drupal yourself? If I can do it, you sure can!

Can anyone add details on the pitfalls of one-click Drupal installations? Please chip in with a comment on your hard-learned lessons!

DreamHost Virtual Private Server

I outgrew my shared hosting. Not in terms of disk space or bandwidth, but in server resources. My sites (including this one) crashed more and more frequently as server memory failed to keep up – or, more often, ran well enough for visitors but sputtered and choked on attempts to perform administration. While the DH staff were friendly and helpful in suggesting fixes, it really boiled down to too-weak shared servers – and, given the very modest traffic on my affected sites, that was frankly a big disappointment.

I flirted with finding a new host, but thought I'd first give the political solution a try: throw money at the problem. I performed the very easy upgrade to DreamHost Virtual Private Server hosting, for both the web server and the MySQL server. The cheapest level (remember, my needs are modest) costs me $14 per month ($15 for each server, -20% for bundle of both servers, -$10 "Monthly DreamHost VPS Subsidy.. a gift from us!"), on top of my basic service (cheap for long-term subscription; it works out to $8 per month or so, I think). For my monthly $20-something, I now have web hosting I'm pretty happy with.

Mostly. DH naturally allows users to monitor memory and CPU usage. These are both always negligible on my MySQL server, but on the web server, CPU usage stays pretty low (with occasional spikes) while memory usage jumps all over, mostly between 100MB and 200MB. That's fine while it stays there, but over a week or two it often climbs higher and higher, up toward the 300MB limit that my payment level gets me. When it gets too high, the sites go down.

Fortunately, there's an easy quick fix that doesn't even require tech support: VPS users can reboot the server on their own. One such kick in the seat, and the sites are back to reasonable memory usage and performance within minutes.

I can't call that a good solution, though. On a critical site with lots of user transactions going on, "meh, just reboot it" doesn't sound like a smart fix at all. Obviously, I have much to learn about managing Drupal resource usage; I should be preventing such runaway memory usage from occurring in the first place.

Anyone else using DreamHost Virtual Private Servers for Drupal hosting? Got stories, whether uplifting or tragic?

FTP access to specific directories 

On my DH article linked at top, I wax thusly:

One gripe I have, though: there's apparently no way to give a site user FTP access to only the files directory of the site in question. That'd be much appreciated by some users as an easy way to upload lots of images or other files for future linking, as opposed to clumsy uploading via Drupal site interfaces. Alas, the only way to offer that access is to grant access to the entire account, and I'm not about to do that!

I can, of course, give users access to their own FTP accounts – but that's now where I host the Drupal sites, so they still have no access to a site's files directory. This isn't something I've explored in detail yet, so there may be some solution; for now, it's an annoyance to tackle in the future.

Well, I received some advice on that front from friendly reader Gold, who wrote me directly when an overzealous spam filter (now fixed - ?) blocked his attempted comment on my DH page. Gold advised me not long ago (well, a little long ago; I've been slow): 

I've been with DH since 2k7 and have to say that I'm extremely satisfied with their hosting. In that time they've had their ups and downs but from my experience with other hosts they're actually better than the rest I've dealt with. I'd put that down to the communication from them and the fact that when ever I've used the Live Support things have been resolved on the spot. While Drupal is now available as a one click install I shudder at the thought of using it to maintain my sites. One of Drupal's strongest points is its security announcements list and things like Drush make this a breeze to support.

opegasus, I would recommend that you you learn a little of the linux command line and get comfortable with SSH. Between drush and a single script I'm able to install and set up drupal in about 3 seconds. SSH allows you to perform all the downloading on the server, so your DSL speed is no longer a factor.

DrupalAce, if you're not already, and it sounds like you are, you should get to grips with ssh and the command line also. I'm going with the assumption that you are familiar with it though, so...

Soft links are your friend.

I'm not a designer. I make no pretense to that role. I'm a coder and know where my limitations are. So, I've partnered with a number of designers and created ftp/ssh accounts for them on my hosting. I run almost everything through a single multisite install. So, with that in mind a client's specific files all live in:

/path/to/drupal/sites/clientdomain

The designers I work with all have their own accounts and I give them a "clients" directory within that. I link clientdomain above into their clients directory.

1. Change permissions on /path/to/drupal/sites/clientdomain so your client can read and write to it

2. log in as that client via ssh and link this into their clients directory

[ps12345]$ pwd /home/client

[ps12345]$ cd clients

[ps12345]$ ln -s /home/drupalace/path/to/drupal/sites/clientdomain clientdomain

[ps12345]$ ls -la

drwxrwxr-x 3 client pg1234567 4096 Jan 18 12:18 .

drwxr-x--x 56 client pg1234567 4096 Jan 18 05:43 ..

lrwxrwxrwx 1  client pg1234567 8 Jan 18 12:18 clientdomain -> /home/drupalace/path/to/drupal/sites/clientdomain

[ps12345]$

This should, if I've recalled the steps right, give your client access to their directory in your sites folder. The same thing can be done for the files dir if it's outside of the document root also.

Hope that helps.

Yes, it just may! I'm going to round up a client volunteer, give that a try, and amend this post with the results. Thanks, Gold!