Wondering if you can install vBulletin in Yahoo web hosting?
Well, looks like you can.
So what’s new? We plan on doing a review of web hosting services that support the installation of the open source scripts.
Why yet another web hosting review?
Because
What are our criteria? Why we think they are important?
This would also be a good exercise for us to get to know more about the hosting offerings out there and also to sharpen our skill.
In closing, we want to take this opportunity to recommend you our current hosting provider RapidVPS. In our opinion, they already ace all our criteria so we will not be doing an actual review about them. We had been using them for close to 2 years now. In full disclosure, you should know we are not related to them in any way except as happy paying customer. Also the link above does earn us a referral, but only if you are happy with their service and stay signed-up (which we think you will). So give it a try.
ps. Any host you would like us to try?
The question is “How do I know the script is able to run on the hosting package that I’m going to buy?”
In this post we outline steps that you can take to make sure you purchase the right hosting.

Once you have done the above steps, you need to know what to look for. Let’s take the example from the WordPress requirements.
PHP version
This is displayed right on top, for example 5.2.5. WordPress says it need PHP version 4.2 or greater, so we are good (5.2.5 is greated than 4.2).
MySQL
On the phpinfo output page search for “Client API version” (Ctrl+F on IE and Firefox). Check the number give against WordPress requirement which is MySQL version 4.0 or greater.
Apache mod_rewrite
This is optional but is useful for SEO friendly URL and such. So if you need that, check for it. Do a search on the page for “mod_rewrite“. It should appears under the Apache section.
And you are good to go!
For other scripts, there may be other requirements such as safe_mode, magic_quotes_gpc, gd, iconv, mbstring. Simply do a search on the page for them and see the corresponding details that follows.
Most of the time they have very self-explanatory values like “on”, “off”. Sometime the presence or absence of the word suggest it is there or not.
Just follow these few steps and you can easily determine if you can your script on the host.
If you have question about whether your host can run a script, send us a note we can help you take a look.