Like a lot of people in Scandinavia, I’ve been using One.Com to host my Drupal 6 sites. It’s a very affordable service, and the support is normally excellent. However, there is one big drawback to One.Com, and it severely limits its usage for anyone with a serious Drupal website.
The problem lies in the 24MB memory limit on shared accounts. That memory limit applies across all the service packages the company offers, so you can’t even upgrade you way out of trouble (I know, I tried).
If you have a small Drupal 6 site, One.Com is a great place to experiment. However, as you site grows and you add more functionality and more modules, you are going to be fast eating into that memory limit. The first sign of trouble will be when you try to access your /admin/build/modules page to activate a new module and you see nothing at all. This “nothing at all” is the infamous Drupal White Screen of Death (WSOD). You have run out of memory for PHP.
If this happens to you, you are probably going to need to uninstall some of your modules. You may be able to temporarily fix the WSOD and see your /admin/build/modules page by switching to a simpler core template if you are not already using one. (If anyone knows of any other fixes for WSOD problem, please post them in the comments – we would all be most grateful to know them!)
Drupal modules that seem to eat a lot of memory include Views and Poormanscron. Most sites use Views, and Poormanscron (or another cron solution) is needed at One.Com because they won’t allow you to run cron automatically. I’m using Porterstemmer to expand my Search module, and I suspect that that is a memory hog too.
One.Com Live Help staff (for whom I usually have nothing but praise) say they cannot change the memory limit on the accounts. If you bother them enough they will tell you to contact technical support, who will also say they can do nothing. This then, becomes a nasty little trap for the unwary Drupal site owner: as your site grows in complexity it becomes more and more of a pain to move it to another web hosting service provider, yet eventually at One.Com, with anything more than a basic site, you are going to hit that memory limit.
If you want to get serious with Drupal, I can’t recommend One.Com. That’s a great pity because in all other ways they are a perfect hosting service. Someone at One.Com needs to take a look at the year-on-year growth of Drupal as a web content management solution, and consider upping that memory limit on shared accounts Real Soon Now.
Tip:
To get Drupal to run at One.Com, I had to comment-out two lines from my .htaccess file. (If you have a multisite installation, you may have several .htaccess files: look in your site root and in the /sites directory.) These were the lines that I commented out:
# Options –Indexes
# Options +FollowSymLinks