Drupal hosting is where most of the "Drupal is slow" reputation comes from, and it is almost always a purchasing decision rather than a software problem. A site gets built properly, then goes live on a plan priced for a brochure site with a handful of PHP files. The result is a content management system with a serious render pipeline running inside a memory limit it cannot change, on an opcode cache it does not control, with no shell to run its own tooling.

The comparison people make in their heads is with WordPress, and it is the wrong one. WordPress runs acceptably on almost anything because its market share forced hosts to make it run acceptably on almost anything. Drupal assumes a current PHP, a recent database, a real cache backend, a command line, and a deployment process that treats the codebase as a build artefact rather than a folder you edit.

What does Drupal actually need from a host?…