Hosting support

I am now getting an error when I navigate to my website (below) after having my server's PHP upgraded (server OS PHP upgrade) from 5.1 to 5.2. I cannot login via any of the "/?=user" tricks and I have checked the settings.php permissions on my server via FTP.

Should settings.php permissions be 644 or 777? It was 644, but I've discovered that 644 is the most secure setting as discussed on the forums here.

As I am getting ready to help a non-profit with their Drupal 7 setup, I thought I would capture my journey through different hosting providers.

In Conclusion
I moved this to top given the way pages are diplayed.

I am going to give SiteGround a try. Between their site focus and good customer service approach, it feels right. I will provide updates as appropriate.

There are many other companies to research. I hope the below info is helpful.

GoDaddy.com
I like GoDaddy as a multi-purposee provider. They registration rates are low and have many option to choose from. So I decided to start with them and setup a site and did my install. Basic Drupal worked just fine (they have a one click option), but Acquia profile caused it to consistently time out. (trying again eventually got me there). Their support did not have Drupal specific knowledge but after moving to the Grid version of their virtual shared hosting (this is about $10/month) I was back in the game.

Pros:

Why am I may not go with them:

Hey fellow Druppies,

NB: This is my very 1st post.

I'm not yet online with my new Drupal site but in the back of my mind always assumed that once I was ready to go live I would need to add to my .htaccess file loads of 301 redirects to redirect any indexed pages to the new page, for example:

redirect 301 /about_us.htm http://www.domain.com/about-us

It has just occured to me there is probably a Drupal module that do this for me.

Can anyone tell me if this is the case?

Hello,
I have setup a rss feed for external site to read it but i have a issue with server cookies.

Here is the response from a tech guys from the external site:

The feed is tested, and the access is still blocked.
The feed is definitely alright to be accessed by a browser, but not our Scan Robot.
This is because our Scan Robot will not save cookies, and was refused by their server .

Can anybody tell me is this a drupal or server problem, and how to solve this.

Best Regards to all,

I'm looking to launch a new Drupal 7 site next month. I'm moving away from MediaTemple due to speed issues. What type of hosting configuration would you recommend if you had a $50 per month budget? VPS, Cloud or Shared???

I'm in the process of converting my website to Drupal. I currently have a devel site on a commercial shared host and the performance is unusable. Oddly, my home server runs it better over a dsl line. I've plunked around the forums for a while, and googled a bit, and I've come down to this: Should I go with a shared host or vps? Is the difference "night and day"? I can really only afford a share host.

Second, which host provider? Again, from what I can tell, ANhost, Greengeeks and Hostgator seem to get mentioned the most, but the reviews are contradictory at best.
thanks