You can set up Drupal in any number of ways. The easiest and most convenient way to do it is with a secure shell (ssh) account. However, if you only have the 1&1 Beginner Package, you will not have access via a shell account. This article explains how to setup Drupal with the 1&1 Beginner Package on a Linux host; the least expensive account available at 1&1.

First, you will need to download Drupal. The latest package as of this writing is available here. Go ahead and download now.

Next, you will need to extract the tarball into a directory on your local hard drive. If you have Linux, you are in luck as the tar command works right out of the box at the shell prompt. However, if you have Windows like most others, you will need an archive utility that can extract tarballs. A nice open source program called 7-Zip for 32-bit systems is available here.

Drupal requires a MySQL database, so login to the 1&1 Control Panel and navigate to the MySQL Administration link under the Web Space & Access section and create a new database that you want to dedicate to Drupal. After creating the database, make note of the Database Name, User Name, Password and Host Name. You will need to edit the file named settings.php located in the sites/default directory on your hard drive. Find the line below and edit it with the database information from above and then save the file.

$db_url = 'mysql://[User Name]:[Password]@[Host Name]/[Database Name]';

Also, you will need to edit the .htaccess file located in the root directory of the extracted archive. Edit it and add the following line at the end of the file.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Since you will be using 1&1's Webspace Explorer at the 1&1 Control Panel, you will need to package the extracted files into a new .zip archive. You can do this with 7-Zip as well.

The next step is to upload the new .zip archive to your 1&1 account directory. Login to the 1&1 Control Panel and click the Webspace Explorer link under the Web Space & Access section. Click the upload icon (arrow pointing up) and browse to the directory where you stored the new .zip archive. After the .zip archive has been successfully uploaded, use the compression menu icon to extract the archive.

After the archive has been extracted, open a browser and entire the url of your site followed by /install.php (eg. http://www.yourdomainhere.com/install.php). Cross your fingers and hope for the best. If everything was configured properly, you should be up and running.

I hope this article was helpful and please do not hesitate to post your comments below. Happy Drupaling!