Drupal 7 on free hosts

By Mahmoud Mostafa | Tue, March 08 2011

I tried to install Drupal 7 on some free hosts, and here are the results :-

ByetHost: Installed as normal, but there is some major functionality problems (HTTP requests are disabled and PHP memory limit is 24MB) Check Drupal status report here Check their PHP info here
FreeHostia: After uploading Drupal files and navigating to the base directory to start the installation process, I was got an internal server error page, and after searching their help pages I found out this :-
Due to technical and/or security reasons a few directives are not allowed to be overriden via .htaccess. Such directives are, for example: Options, ExecCGI, FollowSymLinks, Includes. Also, it is not possible to change values from the PHP configuration using "php_flag" in .htaccess. In case you receive an Internal Server Error 500 message - please check if any of the afore-mentioned directives are present in your .htaccess file and either comment on them by placing "#" at the beginning of the line or delete the entire line. In some cases there are so many lines in your .htaccess that it is difficult to inspect all of them to determine which one, if any, is causing the problem. An easy way to find out whether it is the .htaccess file that lies at the bottom of this problem is to simply disable the file by renaming it to a.htaccess, for example. This action is easily reversable.
original article here - You will need an account to see this page. So, I needed to edit the default .htaccess file (comment out all Options lines, there were three lines) and then proceed with the installation .. there were no progress bar but the database was created, and eventually this php error popped up after configuring the site parameters and the default user (which is the last step in installation) :-
Fatal error: Call to undefined function field_attach_load() in /home/www/drupal-7.0/includes/entity.inc on line 320
When I reloaded the page there was a meesage that Drupal was already installed and a link to the base directory, and for the surprises to continue, when I clicked that link I saw the Drupal "page not found" error page. I, then, tried to empty the database and reinstall Drupal, but nothing changed, it was the same scenario.
Zymic: After uploading, and just when trying to install, I got this :-
500 Internal Service Error You have reached this page due to a malfunctioning .htaccess file. This may be caused by one of two things: Your .htaccess may not conform with the strict htaccess policy of Zymic, to fix this automatically, please click here If the first option does not work, please drop by Zymic IRC and we will assist you in fixing it.
So I searched their site and found this topic : Drupal 7 On Zymic And here is the abstract :
We've been getting a lot of people lately having issues with Drupal 7 installing on Zymic. Currently it is not working at all and are working to figure out a way around whatever bug is happening. It is highly recommended that you use Drupal 6.2 instead as it is the most stable version and it has the most module support.
I guess they mean 6.20, they have another forum topic named Drupal 6.1 Install Tutorial which will simply explain why they discourage installing Drupal 7. (If all this core editing was required to install Drupal 6, it's obvious that installing Drupal 7 will be impossible)

I will try more ones and see what happens next.

Comments

Looking for free drupal 7 host as well

Tue, 10/18/2011 - 14:05 | Drupal 7 Host (not verified)

We have been looking for a free drupal 7 host as well but have yet to discover one that functions as expected. If you find one, please be sure to let us know as well at: http://drupal7host.com/does-free-drupal-7-host-exist

Thanks!