What does does HotDrupal do and how do you work with Drupal?

HotDrupal is a Drupal hosting company that provides a hosting solution with a seamless upgrade path from shared hosting, to VPS, all the way to multiple dedicated server solutions. Our customers really like that we have higher end plans that are the equivalent of "supercharged" shared hosting which gives you VPS-like speeds without the need for you to be a systems administrator. We have a strong commitment to donating back to the Drupal community, as well as to environmentally friendly practices and pro-employee policies.

As a hosting company, why did you decide to get involved with supporting Drupal specifically?

It was the community. Our owner has been involved with web hosting since the early 1990's. After working with some other CMS systems and coming across Drupal, we noticed in the forums how much difficulty people had finding compatible hosting providers that offered good service and had enough power to run Drupal. We thought it would be cool to make a solution that people could use that would "simply work" with Drupal and offer an upgrade path that was simple.

What does it look like for a hosting company to be involved in the Drupal community? What kind of contributions do you make?

In addition to supporting to the Drupal Association and DrupalCon, one of our ongoing contributions is getting involved with the Google Summer of Code project. We donate free hosting to anyone with an accepted project, giving them access to a good hosting platform with tools they need like CVS, SSH, Subversion (SVN), etc.

What should people know about the differences between "Drupal-specific" hosting versus a traditional software-agnostic host?

The big thing is that our servers are tuned for Drupal and are Drupal future-proof. Unlike a regular hosting provider we always have Drupal in mind when upgrading, changing policies, or tuning servers. We are always concerned with how we can maintain compatibility with Drupal and the Drupal Roadmap. You know if you're hosting with us that one question will guide everything we do: "Is this compatible with Drupal, and will it support future versions of Drupal?"

What are you most looking forward to at DrupalCon DC?

Meeting some customers in person!