Drupal at rackspacecloud.com

Drupal poses no major challenges with its installation and generally installs easily. However recently I came across unexpected issues when installing Drupal at rackspacecloud.com.

If the hosting company does not provide you with good erro logs, which is a rare case but may happen as in the instance of rackspacecloud.com you are left to your own devices to diagnose about 'what went wrong'. So following would give you a good insight about the error status. You have do some simple addition to the index.php of Drupal.

-> Insert php error statements directly in the beginning of the index.php. ( Don't forget to remove them when done! )

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', TRUE)
ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);

I obtained hints from this quick insertion about Apache mod_rewrite and memory constraints which can be addressed fairly easily. There are two values that you need update the .htaccess - if you don't have access to the hosting side of the files-, with the following values.

-> ensure the following two lines exist.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

-> add this line to the bottom if you are getting white screens after enabling some modules.

php_value memory_limit 96M

That's all otherwise rackspacecloud.com provides a solid environment to run Drupal.