Twenty minutes later, including finding and buying a domain name, he has a fully functional installation of Drupal running on one of my servers. Another ten minutes later, I’ve talked him through editing his /etc/hosts file so that he can see the site. Add in a couple of extra drupal modules and it’s pretty much ready-to-roll.

How did I cobble a whole site together in 30 minutes? Well, it’s thanks to the incredible automation that my hosting company have built into their control panel. Webfaction rock, no two ways about it.

It actually took me (according the Skype chat history) just 6 minutes to get it up and running – everything from the database to the virtual domain configured with a few clicks in their control panel. And of course, no editing of configuration files – it does it all for you.

Oh, and if you don’t want to use Drupal – and I sympathise – they support pretty much every popular web framework with the same astonishing automation. They don’t charge nearly enough for the service they provide.