Drupal 7 doesn't work on cheap hosting. (This is a secret designed to annoy people when they discover).

This is the conclusion I have reached after loads of developer videos failed to tell me: they use dedicated servers or their own hard discs.

The problem seems to be memory limits which have risen by mistake for no particular reason. Just as a Ryan Schama talks about "project creep" in his lecture, Drupal 7 has a Server Memory Creep towards needing an expensive host which nobody advertised or planned: it just happened and caught a lot of people out.

For those on the borderline there are three cacheing products

I find this frustrating because I did a bit of research over a year ago, trying to find out how to make a low-magin, loss making business sell more and at the time Drupal 6 / Ubercart was the fastest-loading software and I searched for days to find the fastest cheapest host. Now the calculation is a different one which rules out this host and this whole school of software together, and probably Drupal software altogether. I have spent over a year trying to learn the XYZ thing while shopping carts have forked and re-built themselves. Now I discover that I should have gone with Virtuemart in the first place. Such is life. If you read about an american going crazy and shooting people in a shopping mall, maybe they had just tried to install Drupal. Or maybe it was looking at the awful overpriced stock in TKMAX that did it. One of the two.

What other annoying things are there in life? Youth is wasted on the young? Trades unions let you down when you get an unfair dismissal? Radio station editors don't like news or music? Maybe I should petend to be a Bonobo Monkey and live in a park where zoo keepers will feed me.

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Blog on a single page from Veganline.com the vegan shoe shop

Just in case somebody asks, these are the three ways to install Drupal and reasons they don't work for me. I'm writing this in case I need to brief someone to help.

1. A one-click install from the control panel of a server.
   
   (a) Doesn't install the Kickstart version of Drupal Commerce Shopping Cart. This is a bit like a comfort blanket - I think I've learned to do without it - but as the program doesn't work without a lot of tweaking unless you have this installation profile, I'd like to be able to start from the Kickstart version every time I need to.
   
   (b) Puts too much strain on the server if I need to install extra modules. The program is a bit too big to do this on a middling sized server. So I would have to download it onto my hard disc somehow, do the updates and fixes, and them upload it to the server again. This is in fact what I want to do but starting on the hard disc. It comes to the same thing; I still need to back-up everything to my hard disc, tinker there, and upload again.
2. Unpack Drupal on my hard disc, follow rather intricate instructions for file transfer to the server, and turning-on a the database to recognise all these files.
   
   With luck when I upload I get a welcome screen asking questions like "is your database called localhost?" and the thing installs itself. It's a bit of a black art the first few times but I think I've got the hang.
   
   Unfortunately Drupal 6 could almost work like this but Drupal 7 is just too big, and if I stick to older releases I will be missing-out on a lot of shopping cart modules. When I try to install, the server just says it's out of memory and the helpdesk says this can't be changed.
3. Unpack a server onto my hard disc - a set of all the programs a server needs - and press the "import" button to import a version of Drupal, which could be Drupal Commerce Kickstart for the first stage of a shopping cart.
   
   This is the only system that could work and sometimes it does. I have managed once to install Drupal Commerce Kickstart onto a server program called Aquia Drupal Desktop, and from there managed a slightly laborious way of importing the data from its database to the one on my proper server that the world can see.
   
   Unfortunately my installation doesn't work. It finds error messages in every other thing it does. I guess this is because I should have updated or uploaded a load of files that go with Drupal's database onto the server, and I just deleted them thinking that the ones already there might do. Now I can't repeat the actions which worked in the past for this step three.

Even if I could get the thing installed there would be a bit of work laying-out the site using various layout themes or writing one, and I might be quite accident-prone at that.

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Blog on a single page from Veganline.com the vegan shoe shop