By AustinBike on

I run a small website, for mountain biking, not a real business (only drives ~1000 visitors a day, not really a volume site). Anyway, it is built on late 90's technology ASP (pre-.net) and I want to update it to a site with a CMS behind it. We will probably be using Drupal for my work site, so I thought this could be a good opportunity to actually learn the new system by converting my site over first.

My hoster is 1&1 and I have a windows hosting package, I am very technical but not a DB admin, way over my head in that area. The DB is MS SQLserver which is fine, but I expect that I will be doing a lot of editing of the site on planes because I spend a huge amount of time on international flights (nothing like 12 hours to get caught up on creating new content.)

Here's the challenge: I have Drupal set up on a local machine and everything seems to be working, I can create content. But, that was set up with SQLlite because I don't have MS SQL server on my home system. I tried to FTP my working files over to the hosted server, just to see if I could actually read the PHP, but when I do that I get:

HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error

The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

That is exactly what I expected. (SQL Server is set up on my hosted server but I have not tied it to the configuration yet.)

However, I want to know is, before I go down the path of trying to use SQLlite on a notebook and MS SQL server on my production server, I am gonna have a world of problems?

I know that PHP runs fine on my host because I manually edit all of the stuff for our work site on my notebook and for testing once, dropped it on my hosted server, and it ran fine. So my problem is clearly in the database connection.

Will drupal work with different databases? What I assume I would be creating on the dev system while traveling would be directories of biking pictures, reviews of products and galleries of travel pictures. With our PHP system today, I can create the folders, edit one config file and the PHP picks it up and puts it into the directory structure (menu navigation). I am hoping it will be this easy. Any input is appreciated, I am literally 12 hours into the drupal world all of the searching in the forums on multiple databases didn't turn up the right answer.

Thanks in advance.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

mradcliffe’s picture

mradcliffe
he/him
Primary language English
commented

I think your best option is to use Feeds or Deploy. Feeds means that you will probably need to get a dynamic dns or re-configure your production site to point to your local site (that's kind of iffy), and then have it ingest content via RSS. Deploy however is more of a push model so it would work better in my opinion.

You would want to make sure that you're using Features to package up views, content types, etc... into custom modules (not the plural here). This would allow you to install the same structure on your production site.

As a side note, MS SQL Server support is only provided by sqlsrv, which you will need to have the PHP SQL Server Driver 2.0 available on 1&1 (not sure if it is).

AustinBike’s picture

AustinBike commented

Thanks for the input, I will check with 1and1. On a related point, are you familiar with access at all? Is there a desktop db that would be more "compatible"?

John_B’s picture

John_B commented

The extra cost of getting a Drupal hosting company (a 100% Drupal like hotdrupal.com or civihosting.com, not just a company who stick up a Drupal page to attract business) very quickly pays for itself in saved time and headaches, not to mention a faster site. And if you must try to run Drupal on cheap hosting (which I no longer do after so much wasted time and heartache) Linux helps. 1000 visits on a Drupal7 site would be quite demanding if many of them are logged in and you get a few simultaneous logins. Even for all anonymous, I would pay that little extra for a Drupal specialist when looking at the value to me of the time a more suitable hosting account saves.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

you might also consider pantheon-- the next step up in drupal specialized hosting. They include apachesolr search as well as 3 environments (dev, staging, prod) with simple migration between them. you can get a developer account to test it out for free.

AustinBike’s picture

AustinBike commented

Well, at this point I don't think that I will change my host, there are some particular reasons that I am with 1and1 (long story, nobody wants to hear.)

I checked with them and they claim that they do not support PHP on their windows hosting, but then when you look on the windows hosting page it mentions PHP.

One option is to switch to linux hosting, but I can't really do that until I have completely rebuilt the site because once I switch to linux, I am pretty sure that the ASP site won't run.

It seems like their windows hosting is really limited.

Now, here is a question. If I build on drupal, and build the whole thing on my dev machine at home, can I just upload all of the directories to the server and have it run on IIS without a database on the backend?

I will (in the near term) just have content files - the equivalent of HTML. I won't be using any cookies, any logins, any fancy stuff.

Will a site built in drupal work on a server like that? If I can build it and just FTP the site, then I could get it all running on IIS, ensure it is running, then switch to linux hosting, install drupal on that server and migrate the content into drupal.

Is that reasonable to consider?

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

and have it run on IIS without a database on the backend

nope... all the content and config is in the db. Without a db you cannot have a drupal site (or just about any CMS site).