Bryght is now offering hosting packages which help bring Drupal to the masses. Their hosting plans currently come in two flavors, “Bryght Light” and “VPS Hosting”. Bryght Light offers a default Drupal install with an “out-of-the-box” appeal, great for users who want to leverage the benefits of Drupal but don’t want to have to install and configure it from the ground up. Sign up for a hosting plan, obtain access to your site, enjoy Drupal! Can’t get much easier than that.

Similar to Acquia Drupal, Bryght has a default install of Drupal with all sorts of popular modules to help build your site. This saves the average user a lot of time researching and downloading specific modules since most of what you need (or might use) is already there. They also handle all of the support for your Drupal site and hosting.

Here is a list modules you can expect to find upon signing up for the Bryght Light hosting plan.

• Akismet
• Autolocale
• Bryght (Various Bryghtlicious enhancements and ponies)
• Calendar
• CCK
• Date Api
• Feedburner
• GoogAnalytics
• Image
• Image Assist
• Image Gallery
• Image Attach
• Mollom
• OpenID
• Pathauto
• Persistent Login
• Reseller
• SimpleMenu
• TinyMCE
• Token
• Views

That’s a pretty basic, yet solid, list of modules. It is unclear as to what the “Bryght” module entails at the moment. Currently Bryght is offering Drupal 5.10 on their hosting plans (at least the Bryght Light account we have set up) but it is unclear as to when there might be an upgrade to Drupal 6.x.

Aside from the included modules there are also a few additional themes other than default Drupal ones. Here is a list of available themes to choose from.

• Ad_blueprint
• Ad_blueprint - Fluid version
• Amadou
• Basic
• Bluemarine
• Garamond
• Garland
• Interactive Media
• iTheme
• Marvin
• Mirelli
• Minelli
• Pushbutton
• Zen

Nice to see that they included Amadou in there, brought to you by our very own Jay Wolf. There are a few key themes which seem to be missing from this list, and a few I have no clue why are on it, but overall it seems to cover the basics here as well.

The nice part about having the modules and themes readily available to you is that you also have full control over how they work, at least from the admin side of Drupal. If you have already purchased a domain you can use it with the Bryght hosting plan of your choice. If you have yet to purchase a domain, you can create a subdomain on the bryght.com domain (ex: http://sub.bryght.net). File uploads and clean URLs are enabled by default so you can take advantage of SEO friendly URLs and file uploading ability without any extra configuration.

There is no FTP support for Bryght Light but with the VPS hosting plan you have access to shell and SFTP. So if custom theming and more advanced site configurations is what you need, then the VPS hosting plan is the way to go as with Bryght Light you cannot upload your own modules or themes. Bryght Light also comes in a free version in which Bryght runs ads on your site to cover hosting costs. We signed up for the ad supported hosting plan but I don’t see any ads at the moment. Not sure how they are to supposed to look on the site as none have shown up yet.

Server speed seemed on par with other shared hosts but there were a few times I got this error when a page failed to load “An internal server error occurred. Please try again later.” I assume this isn’t an error that appears all the time but it is concerning.

If you are looking to give Drupal a try and would like it already set up and ready to go, Bryght Light would be a good option. It seems to cover all of the basics and would give the new user a great introduction to the power of Drupal. They also offer support for your site which is a great selling point for those new to Drupal.

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