The trials and tribulations of installing Drupal on your 1and1 account server.
To start with, maybe it is best not to download and install the very latest version of any open source program. I did that that with WordPress 2.5 (and found that it was pretty buggy with regard to upload of images. The best answer I got was “stay tuned for more updates.” . Many of the modules that check out fine for version five seem to be “untested” for version 6x. So if you are going for a quick implementation, stay with a tried and true version.
OK, create your database on your server account and make a note of the username, pswrd and host name. For 1and1 that will be something like “xxxxperforxx.net”
As soon as you start to change install and activate new modules (like the image module and image assist module (which, by the way, have to be installed together) you will get an “fatal error” message.
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to
allocate 373670 bytes) in
/homepages/45/d194830414/htdocs/drupal/includes/database.mysql-common.inc on line 41
This is rather opaque and really gives you little help. After puzzling over it for a while, and contacting 1and1 to see if it was something they could adjust (at first I thought I might have maxed out my allotted database space. They assured me that I had 100MB available)
I went to the Drupal support link, put in “memory error” as the key word and it took me to http://drupal.org/node/29268 a page titled “Increase memory in your php.ini”
It made three suggestions for changing the memory settings:
* memory_limit = 12M to your php.ini file (recommended, if you have access)
* ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’12M’); to your sites/default/settings.php file
* php_value memory_limit 12M to your .htaccess file in the Drupal root
I tried the .htaccess file with no effect (but more on that later)
Changing the settings in the “sites/default/settings.php.” file seemed to do the trick. I reset it to 12M, activated the imags module, updated php as requested and was advised in the next screen that I really should be using 16MB. So made that change.
Now to see if that works.