My name is Andreas Tasch, I'm a web developer and have been working intensive with Drupal since 2013. Find out more about me.
On the one hand, to get comparable and realistic offers for projects it is important that the briefing is as complete and possible and answers all important questions. On the other hand, you need to make sure the project offers you receive are reasonable and cover the expected scope of the briefing. Let me show how I can help you.
Drupal is not really a lightweight in terms of system requirements. Despite that there are relatively simple ways to speed sites up using different caching strategies. Beyond that, a deeper look might be needed to identify and remove bottlenecks.