A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy".  In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE.  For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell).  So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan.  Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.

I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple.  I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec.  Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly.  While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there.  All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell.  Simple enough right?  In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ).  However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.

My first difficulty with RZ was that documentation was difficult to find documentation on the site for how to edit the PHP.ini file (used to change the default PHP configuration to suit the needs of your PHP applications) when running PHP 5.  Usually this is an easy thing to do, but I couldn't figure out how to do it on RZ's server.  Fair enough, I contacted customer support and they were very helpful.  Within an hour the customer support representative was able to figure it out and give me the necessary instructions.  However, when it came time to running Drupal I received way too may internal server errors which presented "Page not found" and "Error 500" pages causing me to be very unhappy with little rest.  I suspect they're capping the amount of memory I can use for PHP at 16 Meg along with being very conservative on the CPU usage allowed for sites hosted on their server.  Either way, looking at the forums it appears that many people have had trouble running Drupal on their server and this particular plan just isn't for me.

So until I find a reseller plan that I'm happy with I've started returning my sites back to the cheap shared hosting plan I have been using the past few months.  Here is the real kicker.  Upon returning my sites to the shared hosting plan that I've complained for so long not providing CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE, I found that the budget hosting plan now works.  As far as I can tell, the Drupal 5.2 Search module that works just fine.  I'm not sure why temporary tables are now configured with the shared hosting plan but for the most part I'll keep quiet about it just in case it was a mistake.  The ability to have temporary tables on the plan may just keep me on the current reseller plan a little longer then I had expected.

Either way though, I'm more than willing to hear from others on a reseller plan they would recommend.  Again, I'm looking for CPanel, PHP5, secure shell, MySQL 5, PHP 5, ClientExec, and Drupal friendliness. Is that too much to ask?