Hour 1: Hosting requirements

Best configuration

We recommend the best practice configuration: PHP5, MySQL 5.x, Apache 2.x

1. Web server: Apache is recommended.
2. PHP: Drupal requires PHP 4 (4.3.5 or greater) or PHP 5. Drupal core can work with PHP4 but most of contributed modules requires PHP5.
3. Databases: can be either MySQL or PostgreSQL. The Apache web server and MySQL database are recommended. 
4. Other web server and database combinations: such as IIS and PostgreSQL have been tested to a lesser extent. 

To avoid troubles later, we recommend using the best configuration as stated above. It is also very popular and affordable. More information can be found at: http://drupal.org/requirements

Popular issues

When troubleshooting problems for many customers, we found those issues are frequently met.

• Memory limit: Drupal consumes more memory than other sources. Therefore, you need have to increase memory limit for Drupal.
• Clean URL: if you see your image thumbnails do not display properly, and your URLs have many parameters, it is due to Clean URL. To use "Clean URLs" feature on an Apache web server, you will need the mod_rewrite module and the access permission to local .htaccess files.
• PHP: in rare cases, your hosting provides PHP4. Although Drupal can still runs with PHP 4.3.5, but many contributed modules will not work properly with PHP4. So you should ensure your PHP version is 5 and above.

Drupal hosting partners

When our customers report problems with our themes, hosting issues are more than 70% of the total cases. Most of customers admit that their sites work perfectly in local machines, but when they upload to hostings, many errors show up.

Therefore, adopting a good hosting provider is a very good investment and needed to be done from the beginning. For more information on our partner hosting services, please check our Drupal hosting page.