Webgeer Media

We have been hosting Drupal websites on a 1and1.com shared Linux hosting environment for quite a while now. We have planned to switch to other hosts a number of times, but have always found that there were either reliability problems, or key features were missing from other hosts.

We have found that hosting Drupal sites on 1and1.com to have a few quirks that knowing about will simply your setup (This is all based on our servers. Other servers may not have the same issues.):

• MySQL - When creating a MySQL database you have the option of creating either creating a "MySQL 4.0" or "MySQL 5.0" type of database. Drupal 6 required version at least 4.1.1, but 4.0 installs 4.0.27, therefore make sure you create a MySQL 5.0 database.
• Memory limit - In order to run Drupal you will need to increase the memory limit, and you will need to turn off register globals. You can do this by creating a file php.ini in the drupal directory that has the following:

  register_globals = Off
  memory_limit = 32M
  

  
  
• PHP version 5 - If your server still uses php4 as the default you can switch to php 5 (recommended version) by adding "AddType x-mapp-php5 .php" to the top of the .htaccess file in your drupal directory.
• Mod_ReWrite - I have had problems getting mod_rewrite (Clean URL's) working. I finally found that if I comment out the <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>" line (and the closing <IfModule>) by adding a "#" to the beginning of the line in the .htaccess file, then it seems to work fine.
• Mass emailing - It seems that sending out a number of emails at a time (say to all of your registered users) often gets jammed up partway through. I assume that this is part of an anti-spam system. We have found that we can instead use the "E-mail Marketing Tool" to send emails to our members (we created a simple module to output a properly formatted .csv file of our users.)

I should probably mention that this particulary website has now been moved to a different hosting company, but we still do have some sites on 1and1.