While Magento has some great features – it is very resource hungry, meaning it doesn’t play well with shared hosting providers who have low php memory thresholds on their packages.
For example 1&1, who I use, only offer a php memory limit of 40Mb by default on their shared hosting while Magento require a Memory_limit no less than 256Mb (preferably 512)
From my brief research into shared hosts – I’ve found none that offer this (well for the budget my client has in mind)
For the current site I’m doing the only way this limit really manifests itself is by a horrible error when logging into the admin interface. “HTTP 500 Internal Server Error”
A few presses of F5 to refresh it seems to work ok and the client can access the Dashboard.
Otherwise the whole site seems to function ok.
Imagine my joy (yes it was joy!) to discover I could change the default start page so it bypasses this horrid error:
Go to :
System > Configuration > Advanced > Admin
And change the start up page to “Sales > Manage Products” (for example)
Now when the user logs in – they get taken to the products list to start with – and even better, when they click to get taken to their dashboard – it doesn’t produce this error!
RESULT!