Hosting
Hosting
The founding programmer of Drupal is now running a well funded company which contributes to the Drupal community as well as running various Drupal related businesses and Drupal Gardens from his Acquia company lets you make a Drupal website online for a monthly fee of twenty dollars for up to 3,000 members.
Drupal is also easily installed with a variety of hosting providers (including redware) and many of them will pre-install the Drupal 7 release for you with your own database for a few dollars a month. The advantage of the Acquia solution is that the hardware will scale without requiring any website tuning expertise.
GetPantheon is an alternative hosting platform which provides a sophisticated test environment for serious development without the pain of managing the installation. The system provides you with three installations so you can develop, test, and roll out to product with the minimum of effort. Pantheon even provide source code control so you can distribute any changes to your Drupal installation seemlessly to the GitHub source code management system and maintain releases of your software in the same way as many professionals. Again Pantheon offers web hosting for twentyfive dollars a month with a solution that scales to enterprise level for hundreds of dollars per month.
Pantheon and self-hosting have the advantage that you can extend your Drupal installation as you wish and are not constrained by the selection of Drupal modules that your hosting provider has chosen for you.