System Requirements

To get the most out of concrete5, you need:

• PHP 5.2.x or 5.3x
• PHP Modules: CURL, zip, mcrypt, openssl, GD (with freetype), mysql, mbstring
• PHP settings (primarily for file uploads) post_max_upload_filesize = 20, post_max_size = 20, php memory limit to 64
• MySQL 5.x or higher.
• Apache/IIS (Apache recommended)
• Python 2.6+ (minimum 2.2 - only required by HTMLDiff, which is used when comparing multiple versions of pages.)

Bad Ideas

Some of these setups can be made to work, but really why create problems you don't need?

• Cloud Computing is hit or miss. We've seen decent performance out of some providers, and horrible performance out of others. Whatever you may have read, "the cloud" is not magical and won't help you perform better out of the box. A well provisioned unix server will do a great job of running your website. Unless you really expect huge spikes in demand, you're not really taking advantage of the true benefit of cloud computing. Just sayin'.

• Budget Webhosting is great, but it's also a race to the bottom. Those companies have to keep their VC masters happy in what is quickly becoming a commodity market, so something has to give. What we find typically gives is the quality of service. Sure you may have found a sweet deal on unlimited bandwidth for a buck twenty per month, but your site is on a server with four thousand other sites and MySQL is crying under the load. concrete5 is always going to bring a lot more overhead to your website than just a static webpage would have. If your budget webhost offers concrete5 and it works well, more power to you. If your site seems slow, chances are there's not much we can do beyond suggest you get on a server that isn't over sold. There's some good options out there if you're hunting on a budget, just check out our hosting page.