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Drupal is an Open Source Content Management system. It is a CMS with which you will be able to build a website.

To install Drupal, the hosting setup needs to meet certain set of requirements. The basic requirements are:

• Webserver - As common sense as it seems, I get a lot of questions on how one can install Drupal on a PC in order to setup a website. Unless you are running your PC as a server, it does not make sense to ask that question. What you should be looking for, is a hosting account. Drupal needs to be setup on a server, that responds to requests over the WWW through HTTP. It is recommended to have Apache webserver, but you can install it on IIS too.
• PHP - The webserver must have PHP, in order to process the request and render HTML responses. The version of PHP required is dependent on the version of Drupal you are going to setup. Drupal 4.7.2 requires PHP 4.3 or higher. Only Drupal 4.7.5 (and greater) or 5.0 (and greater) run on PHP 5.x. At this point in time when the post is written, Drupal 6 is under development, and it is recommended to go for Drupal 5.x and PHP 5.x in view of future compatibility.
• Database - Drupal does not store any of the content as files on the webserver, but stores it in database. Hence, you require a PHP supported database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. It is recommended to use MySQL 4.x (and greater) and in case of PostgreSQL, version 7.3 or greater. The out of the box is fully functional in both the databases, but some of the third party modules might not work on PostgreSQL.

Note that Drupal requires the following permissions for the database - SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES. Ensure that you have access to the database in your hosting account and are able to create database with a user who has the above permissions.

In the next post, we will briefly look at the installation procedure for setting up Drupal in a hosting account.