Host Drupal without installing anything
The content manager you choose when an article is not enough: you describe your own content types field by field, and build any listing you want from them.
Starting at €8.99/month
Introduction
Drupal installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. The content manager for demanding sites: highly flexible content modelling, fine-grained permissions, widely used across the European public sector. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Confort at €8.99/month incl. VAT — 4 GB of memory. Drupal pays for its flexibility: on every request it reassembles the definition of your content types, fields, views and permissions before rendering the page. The Symfony service container it is built on loads into memory in each process. Add the listings built with the views tool, which produce broad queries, and the cache rebuild after a configuration change. The 4 GB are what separates a pleasant site from a sluggish one.
People arrive here when a blogging system is no longer enough: they need a directory of facilities with opening hours, a register of council decisions with their attachments, a catalogue of courses linked to venues and trainers. Drupal lets you describe those objects — field by field, with their relations — then build any listing, page or feed from them without writing code. It also brings two things that explain its place in the public sector: multilingual support is part of the core, interface, content and configuration included, and accessibility is a goal the project itself tracks.
What managed hosting changes
Your own content types, described by fields
A "Facility" type with an address, opening hours, a photograph, a reference to a town and a contact. Fields are typed, mandatory or not, repeatable. Content stops being a block of rich text in which you hunt for a value by hand.
Listings built without writing code
The views tool turns any question into a page, a block, a feed or an export: the last ten decisions of this committee, the courses longer than three days, the map of facilities open on Saturday. Filters, sorting and paging are set on screen.
A real editorial workflow
Publication states are configurable — draft, in review, published, archived — and each transition is reserved to a role. Revisions keep the full history, you compare two versions and roll back. Writing by several hands becomes workable.
Multilingual and accessibility in the core
Translating the interface, the content and the configuration is part of the software, with no extension: one page exists in three languages with its own fields. The project also follows accessibility criteria closely, which is why so many European public bodies chose it.
Why hand it over rather than install it
A local authority website
Council decisions, a directory of services, news, procedures, minutes: that many distinct content types, with permissions per department and an accessibility obligation. This is the ground where Drupal has been tested most.
A structured directory or catalogue
A hundred and fifty facility records, each with its hours, contact details and town. One model, and from it you get a filterable list, a map, an export and a feed with nothing redeveloped.
An editorial team with mandatory review
The writer proposes, the manager reviews, the communications officer publishes. Every step leaves a trace, and you can find the version that went live on 14 March.
A site in three languages
French, English, Spanish, with content that does not exist in every language and a translated interface. Drupal's multilingual support is built for this case and needs no extension.
A content backend for an application
The core JSON:API interface exposes content to a mobile app or to a separately built website. Drupal then becomes the back office feeding several front ends.
Hosted in France
In our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. For a public or semi-public site, knowing where the servers are is part of the specification, and the person on the phone speaks your language.
Frequently asked questions
Drupal has a migration framework in its core, originally designed to bring Drupal 7 sites forward and usable for other sources. From WordPress, the usual route is to describe the mapping between posts, categories and media on one side, and your content types and fields on the other, then replay the import as many times as needed. It is more demanding than a button, but it is also what turns loose articles into structured content — which is precisely the point of migrating to Drupal.
Modules are added with Composer, PHP's dependency manager, rather than by uploading a file from the browser: that is an important methodological difference from WordPress, and it assumes some comfort with the command line. In exchange, the site configuration exports to YAML files, which lets you version it and replay it elsewhere identically. Content comes out through the JSON:API interface or through views configured as CSV exports, and the database can be taken as it is.
The learning curve is real: content types, fields, views and roles take a day to become useful, and Drupal cannot be improvised. Major version upgrades require the contributed modules to be ready, which has to be planned. The choice of ready-made themes is far narrower than at the big systems, and a Drupal site is generally designed with a bespoke theme. And for a five-page site it is an oversized tool: the power only pays off when there is structure to describe.
App Confort, at €8.99/month incl. VAT. It provides 4 GB of memory where the application asks for 1.5 GB at minimum: the headroom serves the system, not the decor. You can change plan later without reinstalling.
Yes, they are part of the service. That is particularly useful here: Drupal releases security fixes on an announced schedule, and applying them without delay is the first rule for a public-facing site.