Buying Guide
Drupal vs WordPress from the buyer's side
Written for organisations balancing serious content modelling against a comfortable editing experience — the checks worth running, the trap worth avoiding, and the recommendation we would give a friend.
The short answer
Straight to it: WordPress for the overwhelming majority of organisational sites, and Drupal where structured content, editorial workflow and deep system integration are written into the brief, with our hosting running either comfortably.
The rest of the page shows the working behind that call: which checks to run, the mistake to avoid, and how to verify every claim yourself before money moves.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
NVMe
Storage, every plan
Free
First-year domain
99.9%
Uptime, monitored
Flat
Renewal pricing
Most writing on this subject is a league table funded by referral fees. We do it differently: name the buyer (organisations balancing serious content modelling against a comfortable editing experience), name the checks, name the trap, and make a recommendation we will defend in the open.
Begin from one fact about this market and the rest falls in behind it: entities, fields and views give Drupal an architecture able to model almost any content relationship you can describe. That is exactly why public bodies and universities standardise on it, and exactly why an eight-page site finds it exhausting.
The checks that settle it
This is the scorecard we would use — and we are content to be marked against it too:
How complicated your content model is: Drupal entities and views against WordPress custom post types.
The governance and security bar you have to clear, where Drupal's record makes the argument for you.
The recruitment reality in each ecosystem, and the day rate attached.
How an ordinary working day feels to the non-technical staff producing pages.
The trap most first buyers walk into
Picking Drupal for a brochure site, where you end up funding the construction and upkeep of an architecture built for problems your organisation does not have.
The pattern keeps working because the bill arrives late — at renewal, mid-migration, or exactly when growth takes off. The cure is plain arithmetic: total the cost over two or three years with every add-on you would genuinely need.
What we would buy in your position
WordPress for the overwhelming majority of organisational sites, and Drupal where structured content, editorial workflow and deep system integration are written into the brief, with our hosting running either comfortably.
In concrete terms that is our Turbo option: one flat rate carrying the essentials (SSL, migration, copies, mail) this market prefers to bill separately, with in-place upgrades ready when the work picks up.
The rate you register at is the rate you renew at, so year two costs precisely what year one did — nothing lying in wait on the invoice.
Check every word of this yourself
A host worth your money survives scrutiny: check the renewal figure is published up front rather than tucked into a footnote, put a real question to support at an inconvenient hour and judge the reply, read the refund policy for carve-outs, and look up the company registration — a legitimate business leaves a paper trail.
The refund window covers the rest — bring a live site over (the free migration makes that easy), run it for two real weeks, and let ordinary use answer what no sales page can.
Our interest, declared up front
Most 'best hosting' writing is ranking for hire. Our motive is simpler and stated plainly: we recommend the setup we would sell you either way — which leaves the rest of the page free to be useful.
A copy is taken daily on every plan, and putting a file or a database back is one click in the panel rather than a support ticket.
- Checks you can run again yourself
- Renewal rates published, not footnoted
- A free migration makes the trial easy
- Refund terms with no small print
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
The essentials inside, not added on
SSL, the migration, backups and mail come with every plan rather than appearing as checkout extras.
NVMe and LiteSpeed as standard
The hardware other hosts keep behind premium tiers is simply the baseline build here.
The verdict, turned into an order
The Turbo plan is this page's conclusion in product form — one rate, essentials inside, upgradeable in place.
A refund without an argument
If we are not the fit, leaving is one request rather than a negotiation — which is why we invite the test.
An upgrade path that is real
Shared, VPS and dedicated on one platform — today's choice never boxes tomorrow in.
A company you can look up
UK Health Care Support Ltd, registered in England and Wales — a host whose filing you can read before committing to anything.
Prices Side by Side
Our figures beside the big names
What the market typically charges to join and to renew, set beside ours, including the renewal figure most comparison charts leave out.
| Feature | Hosting & DomainsMost popular | Typical household-name host | Typical bargain host | Typical loss-leader deal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price / mo* | $2.42/mo | $4–$6 | $2–$4 | $1–$3 |
| Renewal price / mo | $2.42/mo | $10–$15 | $8–$12 | $4–$6 |
| Cheapest plan renews at its sign-up price | ||||
| SSL as standard | ||||
| Migration done for you | ||||
| NVMe drives on the cheapest tier | ||||
| Daily backups from the first tier | ||||
| Real humans on support, 24/7 |
*The figure in our column is the cheapest annual plan we sell, read live from the catalogue behind our pricing page, so it cannot drift out of date. The three columns beside it give the ranges hosts in each bracket tend to advertise: opening offers that usually want one to four years up front, then rise when the term ends. We stopped naming competitors and printing their prices, because a number we cannot check on the day you read it does not belong here. Set us against whichever host you are genuinely considering, and read the renewal row hardest of all.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Write the job down in one sentence
Write the workload and the audience in one line — for organisations balancing serious content modelling against a comfortable editing experience, that line alone usually removes half the candidate plans.
- 2
Compare on what year two costs
Take the renewal figure, multiply by the term, add every extra you would genuinely need — the lowest headline price rarely wins that sum.
- 3
Run a real trial inside the refund window
Putting your own site on the platform answers what no review can, and free migration plus the refund terms take the risk out of trying.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- Your existing site brought across by our engineers, at no charge
- WordPress Toolkit, with the updates seen to for you
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- cPanel, which is what most of the industry already runs
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
- Spam and virus screening on every mailbox by default
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Why do large institutions keep choosing Drupal?
Governance at scale. Editorial workflow in several stages, deep multilingual support, a security team with years of public record, and content models sturdy enough to get past a steering committee. Requirements of that shape are institutional, and so is Drupal.
What does Drupal want from its hosting?
Generous PHP memory, a database with room to work, and SSH with Composer and Drush available, which is exactly what the Business tier is shaped for. Smaller Drupal builds run perfectly well on a standard plan, so do not over-provision on reputation.
Does hosting include mail?
Yes — every hosting plan includes mailboxes at your own name, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP plus spam filtering on from the start. There is standalone email hosting too, for a name whose website lives somewhere else.
Can more than one website run on a single plan?
From the Turbo tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own name, mailboxes and certificate, inside one account. If the extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, look at reseller hosting instead: it keeps each one properly walled off.
Keep reading
Hosting With Free SSL
A buying brief without spin, written for buyers who have spotted rival providers charging an annual fee for a basic certificate.
Cheap Dedicated Servers
A buying brief without spin, written for buyers who want bare-metal control at end-of-line prices.
How to Install WordPress
A walkthrough to follow with the panel open in the next tab.
Drupal Hosting
Drupal with Composer, Drush and per-site PHP control to hand.
Secure Hosting
Imunify360, isolated accounts and hardened defaults for security-first builds.
Changing hosts? Run through our checklist first.
A plain order of work for a move nobody visiting will notice: which files go over first, how to carry the mail across without losing a message, when exactly to repoint DNS, and the two mistakes behind nearly every outage we are asked to rescue.
Do it properly this time.
From a first website to a rack of machines, moving up is a change to the account rather than a migration.
View Drupal Hosting plans