14 DAY TRIAL // Following WordPress' example, Drupal, the highly successful open source CMS will launch a free & commercial hosted platform on March 2nd 2011.
After spending over one year in closed beta testing, the team made the big announcement through an email newsletter to all beta testers.
As initially promised, a free hosting plan will be available for websites under 50 MB (in disk size) and a monthly traffic under 5 GB.
Four commercial pricing plans are also available, along with more advanced features like custom domains, support tickets, copyright removal and site duplication.
Three years ago, Drupal was considered the undisputed champion of open source CMS market.
Now, it has been lagging behind WordPress in recent years, alongside its old rival, Joomla.
WordPress' success can be traced back to one key move made by Auttomatic Inc., WordPress' maintainer: the launch of the hosted WordPress platform, known as WordPress.com.
That move sky-rocketed WordPress as the main blog engine on the web, and ensured it a place in web lore, right next to the words “free blogging.”
WordPress also managed to capitalize on its community success, evolving rapidly and vastly, becoming a fully-fledged CMS platform, and quietly sweeping the rug under the competition's feet.
In the meantime, Drupal and Joomla tried to keep up, but slow development pace, both taking about 3 years to issue a new and improved version (Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6), crippled any chances of keeping pace with WordPress.
Now Drupal is attempting a comeback with its Drupal Gardens project, but in the end this might be just a bit too late, since other more obscure CMSs, Business Catalyst and LightCMS to name a few, have already beat it to the punch, providing the same services for quite a while now.
One detail in the Drupal Gardens free service seems to be lacking though. The possibility to add a custom domain.
Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger, WordPress and many other platforms are allowing users to use their own domain name for free versions of their service. Drupal Gardens doesn't, and this might turn some users away from Drupal Gardens.
Nevertheless, the SiteBuilder feature in Drupal Gardens is quite unique and innovative, and will surely attract many users, due to its easy way of creating and customizing a website.
Drupal Gardens has seen great reviews while in beta testing, currently powering over 40,000 websites.