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For Drupal

Enterprise Drupal without the enterprise bill

Real VMs for PHP-FPM, public and private files in S3-compatible storage through s3fs, and anonymous traffic cached in 988 locations. Multi-site ready, and you keep root.
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Free to sign up. No egress fees on any product.

Why Drupal on Edge

Everything the managed Drupal hosts sell, on VMs you control

The platform pieces Drupal teams rely on, on infrastructure that never bills per page view.

  • Real VMs for PHP-FPM

    Dedicated CPU and NVMe storage, sized to fit. None of the noisy-neighbour slowdowns of shared Drupal hosting.

  • s3fs for public and private files

    The well-trodden s3fs module points both file systems at Edge Storage. Files survive any VM rebuild.

  • Image styles, accelerated

    Keep Drupal image styles, or let the CDN produce AVIF, WebP and responsive variants on demand and cache them.

  • Anonymous traffic on the CDN

    Anonymous pages and /sites/default/files cache in 988 locations. Logged-in users go to origin as usual.

  • MySQL, MariaDB or Postgres

    Run the database on the same VM, on its own VM over a private network, or at your existing provider.

  • Multi-site friendly

    Several sites on one VM with separate databases, or one VM per site. The CDN routes each domain to the right origin.

Reference architecture

How Drupal maps to Edge

Drupal and Redis on the web VM, Postgres on its own VM over a private network, files in object storage and the CDN in front.
  • Compute

    Runs Drupal, Nginx and PHP-FPM, plus a separate database VM.

  • Storage

    Holds the public and private file systems through s3fs.

  • CDN

    Caches anonymous HTML and every /sites/default/files URL.

  • Image optimisation

    Responsive variants, smart cropping and modern formats on the fly.

  • DNS

    Anycast DNS for the apex, www and each multi-site domain.

  • Shield

    Replaces CAPTCHA modules on webforms, comments and sign-up.

  • Assist

    Answers grounded in your published content, one tag in the theme.

Deploy

Drupal on Edge in four steps

Composer, Drush and s3fs, exactly as you use them today. The only new part is the Edge CLI.
  1. 01

    Provision the web and database VMs

    The lemp script brings PHP 8.3 and Nginx. The postgresql script installs PostgreSQL 16, the minimum for Drupal 11. Add php8.3-pgsql on the web VM.

    shell
    $ edge compute create --name drupal --size s-4vcpu-8gb \
    --image ubuntu-24 --region london --script lemp

$ edge compute create --name drupal-db --size s-2vcpu-4gb \
    --image ubuntu-24 --region london --script postgresql \
    --script-param db_name=drupal

$ edge storage create acme-files
  2. 02

    Point s3fs at Edge Storage

    Keep keys in the environment. Serve files from your own CDN domain so every URL is cacheable.

    web/sites/default/settings.php
    $settings['s3fs.access_key'] = getenv('EDGE_KEY');
$settings['s3fs.secret_key'] = getenv('EDGE_SECRET');
$settings['s3fs.use_s3_for_public'] = TRUE;
$settings['s3fs.use_s3_for_private'] = TRUE;

$config['s3fs.settings']['bucket'] = 'acme-files';
$config['s3fs.settings']['region'] = 'us-east-1';
$config['s3fs.settings']['use_customhost'] = TRUE;
$config['s3fs.settings']['hostname'] = 'storage.edge.network';
$config['s3fs.settings']['use_path_style_endpoint'] = TRUE;
$config['s3fs.settings']['use_cname'] = TRUE;
$config['s3fs.settings']['domain'] = 'files.acme.org';
  3. 03

    Deploy with Composer and Drush

    drush deploy runs database updates, imports config and rebuilds caches in the right order. Copy existing files across once.

    shell
    $ composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
$ drush deploy
$ drush s3fs:refresh-cache
$ drush s3fs:copy-local
  4. 04

    Front every site with the CDN

    Add one domain per site. Blue/green later is a single origin update.

    shell
    $ edge cdn create --name acme-drupal
$ edge cdn domains add cdn-a1b2c3 \
    --domain www.acme.org --origin https://<vm-ip>
$ edge cdn domains add cdn-a1b2c3 \
    --domain files.acme.org --jit-image \
    --origin-type storage --storage-bucket acme-files

Prefer to hand it off? Give the job to your AI agent or have our engineers do it.

What it costs

Three Drupal sites, one predictable invoice

A web VM, a database VM, a CDN deployment and a bucket. No per-page-view pricing and no environment surcharges.
  • No per-page-view or per-environment fees
  • 500 GB of image bandwidth at $0 egress
  • Root and database access on every VM
  • Hourly billing with optional hard caps
See compute pricing

Estimated monthly bill on Edge

~1M page views/mo · 500 GB image bandwidth · 3 sites

USD
  • Compute · web$38.47Performance VM · 4 vCPU · 8 GiB · Drupal + Redis
  • Compute · database$19.24Standard VM · 2 vCPU · 4 GiB · PostgreSQL 16
  • CDN$5.0020.5M requests: 500k free, then 20M × $0.25 per million
  • Storage$3.00205 GB of files: 5 GB free, then 200 GB × $0.015
  • DNS$0.00Zones for all three sites
  • Egress$0.00
Total$65.71

Indicative monthly cost · mid-sized Drupal estate

  • Acquia Cloud Professional~$500–1,500
  • Pantheon Performance~$300–800
  • Edge (VM + CDN + Storage)~$50–120

Indicative figures. Add Expert Services for a fully managed equivalent.

FAQ

Drupal on Edge, answered

Something else? Ask an engineer.
Drupal 10 or Drupal 11?
Both. They're standard PHP stacks, and the lemp script ships PHP 8.3 with Nginx. Add Composer and Drush and you're ready.
How does this compare to Acquia or Pantheon?
Cheaper, with real CPU and IO, and you keep root and database access. The trade-off is that you handle module and OS updates yourself, or our Expert Services team does.
Can I do blue/green deploys?
Yes. Build the release on a second VM, then run edge cdn domains update with the new --origin. Traffic moves with no downtime; retire the old VM when you're happy.
What about Redis or Memcache cache backends?
Run Redis or Memcached on the web VM for the lowest cost, or on its own VM over a private network when you scale out. The redis library script sets one up with auth and persistence.
Does multi-site work?
Yes. Run several sites from one codebase on one VM with separate databases, or give each site its own VM. Add each domain to the CDN deployment and it routes accordingly.

Drop-in services

Add these without touching the stack

Shield is one server-side check and Assist is one script tag. Both work alongside whatever you already run.

CMS

Other stacks on Edge

All 38 stacks

Move Drupal to Edge

Start free with one site, or migrate a whole multi-site estate. Expert Services can plan and run it.

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