By linda_bh on

Hello,

I have a drupal project that I want to start hosting and publishing online.

I have few questions here (and please bear with me till the end bcause this is the 1st time I use hosting):

1. My project was built on Windows. I thought about hosting on Linux because most of the hosting companies have drupal, ldap, mail, apache on Linux. And this is my area of expertise. So my question is: Is it easy to migrate my project to Linux provided that Iinstall the same modules as in WIndows?

2. If I used Linux (and please dont turn the subject into which solution is more powerful), will it be a limitation in terms of web design later on? I mean it could be that developers will tell me: Oh you have the site on Linux while my expertise is on Windows. It should not be the case. Right?

3. When I use the shared hosting (so far this is the cheapest one), will I be able to manage drupal configuration (modules, ...) and apache (redirection,...), and ldap? I know I should check with the hosting companies but what are the norms there in shared hosting. Actually I did not use this service before.

4. And finally and this is the most important question: I want to build my own website (based on drupal) and put the project in one seperate tab called Demo. So in other terms, I have a drupal site that I want to put inside another drupal site. Is this the correct description (of course, the demo will use relative path of my principle website)? Or should I start everthing from scratch when I will build the demo. There must be a way you people publish your solution first as a demo before putting it in its official URL.

Thank you in advance. and again please bear with me these newbie-type of questions.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

jamesoakley’s picture

jamesoakley
Primary language English
Location North Yorkshire, UK
commented

Hi Linda

1. It shouldn't make any difference. If it runs in Drupal-under-Windows it will run in Drupal-under-Linux.
2. You only need Windows if you need features like ASP.NET or MS SQLServer, or if you want MS Exchange for e-mail. If you're going to be using Drupal for your websites, you don't need any of those features. So it shouldn't be a limitation. If the web developer you pick is a Drupal expert, an interface like cPanel is intuitive enough that it shouldn't get in their way of helping you with your site.
3. You'll be fine with Modules, as you'd have full access to your home directory within the file system, so you can put whatever Drupal modules you want in ~/sites/all/modules. You'll be fine with things like Redirection - although ask the host because no host will have every Apache module installed. ldap is more specialised, and may give you problems - what would you want to do with it that can't be done another way?
4. Personally, I use a subdomain, which you'd be fine with Linux shared hosting. So you have something like demo.yoursite.com containing a copy of yoursite.com. You'd put that in a different directory, and you could use htpasswd to password protect it if you want to keep spiders and snoopers out. Using subdomains has the advantage that you have an exact clone of the whole site, which makes it easy to copy the demo version to the live location - just copy the file system and copy the database in phpMyAdmin, then flush the cache.

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linda_bh’s picture

linda_bh commented

Hello James,

I understand that cpanel, in a nutshell, is a tool that ISP provides so that I administer my hosted services. Is this correct?

I thought of ldap because I might use OG in drupal and implement e-mails later on. So drupal users will be hosted in ldap.

Now again back to the most important issue here:
The fact is that I have built a site for my client. But I want to put it as a demo on my own site. Now you are suggesting a subdomain which seems ok with me. But should I need to run another drupal for this demo site or can I integrate it in drupal?
I thought also about putting a demo for each client so that everyone gets his own demo when he logs in. is this feasible in drupal (views, …) and am I complicating the solution that can be much easier (for example, again create a sub-domain and handle them in apache itself (here again, should I use a different drupal?)

thanks for your suggestions/clarifications

jamesoakley’s picture

jamesoakley
Primary language English
Location North Yorkshire, UK
commented

1. cPanel - if by ISP you mean your provider of web hosting, then yes. It's technically a web hosting control panel. You use it to add e-mail addresses, manage your databases, and so on. Others you see out there are Plesk or Direct Admin.

Some of the larger hosts (GoDaddy, 1and1, etc) have written their own control panels in-house. I've never yet found a control panel as intuitive as cPanel - these custom ones are always more unwieldy. More fundamentally, they have the effect of tying slightly you to that host, as it's a really simple matter to move your hosting between hosts if they use the same control panels. Moving from a host with a custom control panel always has to be done by hand, which means fewer hosts will do it for you, so it makes it harder to move.

2. ldap - you don't need to use ldap for OG. I'm no expert on OG, but as I understand it there are modules that tie OG to ldap, but that's not the only way to use it. To find out if you really need ldap, you're best opening a separate forum post, or opening a support issue in the OG issue queue, to outline how you might use OG and to ask how to do it.

3. You'd need to run another drupal for that demo site. That's what you want, though, because otherwise it's really hard to untangle the two sites later. If you only have one Drupal installation, you have one list of users for your site and the client's demo site. Migrating from the demo to the live site would have to be done by hand. If you have a separate Drupal installation, you migrate the site to their live site by just cloning the entire database.

Having said you need a separate Drupal installation, you only have to have one file system. If you use the multi-site way of installing Drupal, you could have the Drupal core and any contrib modules you need in your web directory. Then have one subfolder in the /sites folder for your own site, and another for a demo site. That way, your site and the demo site use one file system but each has its own database.

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linda_bh’s picture

linda_bh commented

thanks bunches James!