Enable Clean URL’s with 1and1 hosting

One of the first tasks when performing a brand new installation of Drupal is to ensure that clean urls are enabled in order to remove the horrible “?q=” from the urls in the site. Having a site without clean urls is not only bad for SEO purposes, but creates an extra barrier for users who might remember a certain page on your site. When they return they have to remember to type http://www.example.com/?q=page_title instead of the format that they are used to.

Having recently upgraded to Drupal 6.14, and as I’m currently running my sites on 1and1 hosting, clean urls are not enabled by default so I have to manually enable them after installation. The easiest way to do this is follows:

1. Open your site’s .htaccess file
2. On line 75 change RewriteEngine on to become RewriteEngine On
3. On line 101 uncomment the RewriteBase /

Return to http://example.com/admin/settings/clean-urls and the option for clean urls should be available.

These instructions are correct as of Drupal 6.14 but may change in future versions

4 Responses to Enable Clean URL’s with 1and1 hosting

Bekka says: October 8, 2009 at 2:43 pm

Thank you thank you thank you!!!

Gary Harris says: October 23, 2009 at 3:57 am

Thank you soooo much! Spent an hour looking for the problem!

Graeme says: October 23, 2009 at 2:12 pm

Glad I could help guys, it took me a while to figure it out so thought I’d post the solution here.

Stuart says: February 17, 2011 at 11:41 pm

Top tutorial, thanks dude.