Liberation Day! (The Netherlands celebrates every May 5th that the country was liberated from German occupation at the end of World War II.) Time to liberate ourselves from a dilemma. The problem is clear: I make the vast majority of websites with the Drupal CMS. That is now on version 8, while version 9 is being worked on. The latter means that support for version 7 will soon come to an end. That in itself poses a problem for us because we have not yet succeeded in building the webshop in Drupal 8. The modules needed for payment processing are not yet available in Drupal 8. That also has to do with my choice of Ubercart as the core of the shop. This is simpler in Drupal-Commerce, but Commerce is too complex in other respects for a simple bookstore. In the vast majority of examples of e-commerce sites, it concerns the sale of t-shirts, for which it must be possible to indicate that a certain shirt of a certain brand in a certain fabric is available in an enormous number of variants because the size and color do not have to be fixed in advance. We sell books. And an ebook is a fundamentally different product than a paper book, even if the content is the same. We, therefore, do not work with product variants.
Anyway, a module has been announced to make our payments provider (Mollie) also accessible from Drupal 8 with Ubercart, or else I'll have to build it myself...  Immediately the next problem comes into play: Composer!

Composer is a program used to properly install and manage program packages. Since version 8 Drupal is also dependent on Composer. There is a way around it, but it is extremely complex and error-prone. Nothing wrong with that were it not that Composer only has a cli, a command-line interface, ie works from the command prompt. And that is not possible under a standard shared hosting account. I tried to get around that by installing phpshell on the provider's server, but they immediately thought our account had been hacked because phpshell usually means bad intentions.

So I had to look for some form of hosting where I can access the command prompt. That's usually called SSH hosting. SSH is a technology that allows you to securely access the command prompt. After some research, it became clear to me that in Europe SSH hosting is really only available to those who include a VPS or a physical server in the package. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, where you basically use a "piece" of a large server. As a user, you actually see no difference between a VPS and a physical server, apart from the difference in speed. A VPS is more than sufficient for our applications. And a first scavenger hunt yields advantageous opportunities. Looking further tomorrow...