Note the following:
Our bolding.Database server
Recommended: MySQL (or an equivalent such as MariaDB)
Drupal 5.x and earlier supports MySQL 3.23.17 or higher. MySQL 4.1 or higher is strongly recommended.
Drupal 6 supports MySQL 4.1 or higher.
Drupal 7 will only support MySQL 5.0.15 or higher, and requires the PDO database extension for PHP (see What is PDO?).
There are several drop-in replacements for MySQL. Drupal has been extensively tested with MariaDB, and version 5.1.44 (or greater) is recommended. It is also likely that other drop-in replacements will work well with Drupal, but they have not specifically undergone testing.
Our bolding.Recommended: PHP 5.2 for Drupal 5 and 6, PHP 5.3 for Drupal 7
Source: System requirements http://drupal.org/requirements
At the same time note:
Source: http://drupal.org/node/34022A lot of new Drupal users run into issues getting Drupal to work properly on their webhost. These problems are not Drupal problems as such, they are usually the way the webserver is configured. Complex and functional web applications like Drupal will naturally require a lot more from a web server than just hosting a static HTML site would.
Complete installation guide here: http://drupal.org/documentation/install
Our preferred installaion method is "Quick Install with Ftp": http://drupal.org/node/1011872
2. After installaton
There are some things that you should do after the installation http://drupal.org/documentation/install/after is finished like settin up a cron job http://drupal.org/cron. With drupal 7 that is very simple:
and configure clean URLs http://drupal.org/getting-started/clean-urls .Triggering Drupal cron without a cron job
With the inclusion of "Poor man's cron" in the Drupal 7 core, it is no longer necessary to set up a cron job on your web server. Instead, you can configure the frequency with which cron is run on admin/config/system/cron (Administration > Configuration > System > Cron).
You should also regularly visit the recent updates page http://drupal.org/documentation/updates and the API page http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal . You find the online documentation here: http://drupal.org/documentation