Running Joomla on 1and1 shared hosting package

Some of my clients use 1&1 hosting for their Joomla websites and in doing so there are a couple of tweaks you need to make in order have Joomla running on PHP5 (most desirable for Joomla 1.5.x) and with SEF (Search Engine Friendly or human readable URLs).

PHP5 on 1&1 shared hosting packages

By default, at time of writing this, 1&1 shared hosting packages come with PHP4.x by default. However, they have PHP5 available and it can be invoked by placing the following 2 lines into the top of '.htaccess' file that comes with Joomla.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

Should you need to switch back to the default PHP4.x version, simply remove these two lines.

SEF URLs on 1&1 shared hosting packages

This is very simple but is worth mentioning as I often get asked this same question.

Again, by editing the following line below in the '.htaccess' file that comes with Joomla. This 'unquotes' or makes active the RewriteBase instruction.

# RewriteBase /

To

RewriteBase /