The Drupal community, and open-source community at that, has always had the altruistic goal of being accessible to all. The hope is that as freelancers and tech gurus go out into the world, maybe we can help by making better, more secure websites.
And then you have piece-of-crap hosting like that of Network Solutions.
Now, I only bring this up because as I work with clients to get their internet presence setup, sometimes you're stuck working with their choice of hosting provider, hosting package, and admin credentials.
This means crazy php.ini setups, no ssh access (because the cheap plans don't enable this), and passwords like '1234myfirstname'. Never the eternal pessimist, I figured I'd leave a few words of encouragement and one small tip to those that run into this.
First, don't give up. Although you can't convince your client to pay you monthly hosting fees on your leased vps (who hasn't tried that?), continue to make their internet presence more than a site built by iPowerweb. Yeah, you may have to wrestle with a table-filled layout, but a little progress is better than no progress.
Second, scour the drupal forums for a solution. Sometimes it may take a couple of days, but it seems like everytime I run into a roadblock, someone else has as well. A forked, non-hacked core, Drupal install on a POS hosting provider is STILL better than an MS Access-driven site hosted by 1and1. :-)
Third...if you're on Network Solutions, and get the dreaded email of 'we will not turn off register_globals or magic_quotes_gpc because it would affect other shared hosted sites', take a deep breath, laugh at them uncontrollably, blog about it, then put this piece of code in the cgi-bin of your vhost within a text file called 'php.ini':
register_globals = off magic_quotes_gpc = off
Yeah, this whole blog post was all about solving the Drupal install message of 'TURN THIS CRAP OFF', but I figured the it was better suited for the community to at least know I didn't give up! Why it ignores this directive in .htaccess or the ini_set() in the settings.php is beyond me, but....it does work.
Thanks go to this forum post, btw.