The title might sound harsh, however, it is based on our real experience with different customers where their hosting environment was not fulfilling minimal requirements for a WordPress site.

There are some specific hosting companies we do not suggest, however, any basic/shared hosting plan can be a disaster for you regardless of the company you choose. Before you purchase hosting package, make sure you have the ability to:

• Increase memory limit
• Edit PHP configuration

Memory limit

Memory limit is an important factor when it comes to importing theme demo content but also when editing posts/pages and using your website on daily basis. Deficient memory limit will lead to a lot of problems in your site, such as data processing, skin compiling and other related “expensive tasks” for server memory.

PHP configuration editing

Well, to increase memory limit and other suggested vars you need to edit a php.ini template file in your FTP or directly from your cPanel. In some hosting providers you can also apply PHP configuration parameters right in the .htaccess file for example (this method is supported on Apache module):

#format
php_value setting_name setting_value

#example
php_value  memory_limit  128M

But this is not the case when you are hosted on some hosting companies, they don’t provide such an ability to modify these values.

Restricted external URL access

Some rare hosting providers do not allow external URL access (cURL) and thus it makes our API server unavailable to access. This will disable theme activation, theme updates and demo content import for Kalium.

This is a rare case but asking your hosting provider if it allows requests on laborator.co and kaliumtheme.com will help you with your decision.

What should I do?

Picking up the right hosting provider is the key, everything else will flow smoothly. Otherwise, open a support ticket at your hosting company and ask them to help you with these basic requirements. In some cases you are obliged to change the hosting plan and issues will be solved.

Please read Recommended PHP configuration limits article.