If you’re trying to choose an approach to open-source content management, Drupal web hosting stands out from the rest because of its ability to provide flexible, sophisticated and extremely robust websites, applications and social media networks. Below are several reasons why so many businesses and individuals have chosen Drupal for their online project, and why you should consider it as well.

Tried and Tested

Initially released in 2001, Drupal is now in its seventh release and has an enormous user base. It is currently used by some of the world’s largest companies and organizations when they want to build websites capable of handling high levels of visitor traffic. Some of these businesses and organizations include: Yahoo, AOL, Warner Bros Music, Amnesty International, Harvard University, Nike, FedEx, the government of New Zealand, and Universal Music Group.

Entirely Open Source

One of the key advantages of using Drupal web hosting is that it allows you to avoid purchasing proprietary software from a single company. Instead, Drupal has been created – and is maintained – by thousands of programmers around the world who are determined to provide the best content management system possible. This offers several other important benefits:

You can slash your costs with Drupal software. Drupal, its associated modules and many professional level themes are available for free. This permits you to devote more of your budget to customization and development, instead of shelling out large sums for licensing fees and ongoing support.

• You get faster enhancements and updates. The Drupal team provides maintenance, security and upgrades much more frequently than a proprietary system could provide.
• Drupal developers avoid adding bloatware to the software, so that you get the features you actually need instead of the unnecessary ones you don’t want.
• It’s easy to use. Drupal is written using PHP, an accessible and highly popular web programming language. Not only is the learning curve for understanding the Drupal framework very short, it can easily be maintained and further developed by the existing large base of web developers.

Easily Customizable

A basic Drupal website can be installed and running in only an hour, but this system is easily customizable, permitting you to choose the layout, features and functions you need. You can also choose to make it lean and simple or fully featured.

As an open source content management framework, Drupal provides a platform which allows developers to enhance its basic functionality. While other CMS software forces you to stick with what the original developers thought a website should be, Drupal lets you make your website your own way. If a module doesn’t do what you want, you can go directly to the source code and change it so it does.

Can Be Rapidly Deployed

While old-style website development involved huge amounts of documentation and offered nothing for the client to look at over the months of development, Drupal features fully implemented Web 2.0 functionality that lets the user quickly publish the basic website with its core features. Other enhancements and custom features can be added later. This has several advantages:

• Your budget for initially launching the site can be smaller.
• You can expand the site later with new features as your finances allow.
• These enhancements can be based on feedback from the website users themselves.

Built-In Online Community Features

Other competing software tends to treat blogging, forums and article commenting as secondary, almost adding them as an afterthought. Drupal places these features at the core of the software, making it easy for website users to add content to your site based on the permission level you have provided.

These capabilities mean you can rapidly deploy a site with essential social networking capabilities without the need for third-party products or customization. But if you want to take these features further, you can easily add custom modules. These contributed modules will let you build a professional Facebook, YouTube or Flickr page using just Drupal.

Long-Term Business Security

Thanks to its extreme reliability and a dedicated security team constantly monitoring security issues, any business organization using Drupal for content management can have a high level of confidence in the business security it provides, as the following points out:

• You don’t necessarily need to integrate multiple third-party products, making Drupal less complex and difficult to use. But it still provides all the functions and features you will need within a single framework, offering you more control over both the system and its users.
• As your business needs change over time, Drupal has the flexibility to incorporate new functionality, features and design changes quickly and easily.

The long-term viability of Drupal as a content management system is superior to that of proprietary CMS products because of the time and effort the global development community that has invested in maintaining and perfecting the platform.