Craft CMS
Hosting

Craft CMS is one of the few commercial CMSs I genuinely recommend without hesitation when the use case fits. It's the platform agencies pick when they want a polished editor experience that competes with Contentful, but they want to self-host the content and own the build. It costs money per-site for the Pro edition, and that money is well-spent because the team behind it ships, supports, and respects backwards compatibility about as well as anyone in this space.

I host Craft sites for several agencies and a couple of in-house editorial teams. The pattern is always the same: a designer-led agency that wants pixel-perfect front-end control, a development team comfortable with Composer and Twig, and an editorial team that needs a calm admin without a 200-row plug-in list. Craft delivers all three.

What works well: the admin UI is genuinely the best I've seen on any CMS at any price. Editors love it. The matrix block field type, where you compose long-form content from typed blocks (rich text, image, quote, code, embed), is the right model for modern editorial work and Craft has had it since version 2. Multi-site support is built in and works without plug-ins. The GraphQL API is well-designed for headless setups.

"Craft CMS is what you pick when you want to build a content-driven site that still feels considered three years after launch. The licence cost is the cheapest line item in any project where Craft is the right answer."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

What's annoying: Composer-based deployment means you need a real deployment workflow, not FTP. Plug-ins are mostly commercial, which is fine if you accept that as a cost of doing business but a surprise if you came from WordPress. PHP requirements are aggressive, current Craft needs PHP 8.2+ which means you can't run it on the cheapest end of shared hosting. The licence per site adds up if you have many small client sites.

Hosting profile: Craft wants a real PHP 8.2 environment with OPcache properly tuned, plenty of memory (we'd suggest 512MB minimum for the PHP process), MySQL 8 or PostgreSQL with reasonable buffer pool, and ideally a Redis or local cache for sessions and template caching. That puts Craft solidly in our managed cloud server tier from £9.99/mo. We've run Craft on shared for very low-traffic showcase sites, but it's not where Craft does its best work.

For agencies, we typically set up a Craft client on a dedicated cloud server with staging and production environments, set Composer in deploy hooks, configure database and uploaded-asset backups separately so a content restore doesn't have to roll back code, and tune OPcache and Redis for the front-end load. Page-load times under load on a properly tuned Craft setup are excellent. Asset transforms run lazily on first request and cache afterwards, which is the right pattern for editorial workflows.

If you're running an editorial team or you're an agency picking a CMS to standardise on for higher-end client work, Craft is a strong candidate. Try the free Solo edition on a free trial server, build a real content type with matrix blocks, and put it in front of an editor. You'll know inside an hour whether it's the platform for you.