Hosting SugarCRM on 1and1 Shared Package

1and1.com provides an economical shared hosting package. And with features such as php libraries built with the imap-c libraries, a generous daily smtp relay limit, php5 and mysql support, it felt like the ideal place for me to host a SugarCRM instance.

However, receiving several errors after the install was complete made me think that perhaps I should have done more research before shelling out the money for a new hosting provider.

Then I remembered Google…

After a bit of searching I found what I needed to know in order to get SugarCRM running on 1and1 shared hosting.

1) Permissions

Certain SugarCRM directories and files are required to be owned by the same group that owns the Apache web server. If this is not the case, you will many errors at the header of the sugar pages once per session:

Warning: chmod() [function.chmod]: Permission denied in /htdocs/sugardir/include/utils/sugar_file_utils.php on line 194

Specified directory ” for zip file ‘cache/upload/langpack_ge_52a_ce.zip’ extraction does not exist. the CHMOD errors in line 196.

Changing ownership of SugarCRM directories\files to this group is only possible with root access. And on a shared host such as 1and1, you will not have root access.

The document here describes what to do if you are using Sugar on a shared host. This did not work for me. And yes, I know it is not secure.

A bit more digging around turned up this post. It describes a line in config.php that attempts to set a directory to mode 1528. The author simply changed this mode to 1520. I tried it. It worked!

array (
‘dir_mode’ => 1528, <——- Change the 1520 to 1528
‘file_mode’ => 432,
‘user’ => ”,
‘group’ => ”,
),

2) Zlib compression

After the permissions problems were resolved, I received a new set of errors:

PHP … Cannot change zlib.output_compression – headers already sent …

Again a quick search on google turned up the answer. Create a php.ini file in the hosting root directory with the following line: zlib.output_compression = On.

Now all is well with SugarCRM on 1and1

This guest post is by Kelvin Johnson, an applications Developer from Blue Island, Illinois, USA