The following is a list of requirements for the server / web hosting space you are planning to run Viper Cart on. Viper Cart (Customer Store Front and Administration Area) can be accessed from any computer with a modern web browser (including Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and above and Mozilla FireFox 1 and above) with Javascript and Cookies enabled. If using Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the Administration Area, we recommend version 7 or above.

Operating System
The operating system of the server you plan to run our software on does not matter. It will work on all operating systems including :-
- Linux
- FreeBSD
- Solaris
- Windows
- Mac

We do however strongly recommend you run Viper Cart on Linux as this works better with some of the other requirements listed below.

Web Server
Viper Cart will work with Apache (1.3+ and 2+) and Internet Information Services (IIS). We strongly recommend you use Apache if possible as certain functions within Viper Cart only work within Apache (such as full Search Engine Optimised URLs).

If using Apache, we recommend the following options :-
- .htaccess files (AccessFileName and AllowOverride directives) should be enabled.
- mod_rewrite module should be enabled.
- AcceptPathInfo directive should be set to either On or Default (Apache 2 only).

PHP
You will need PHP installed on your web server for our software to work. We support Version 5.2 and above.

The folloing PHP Extensions are required :-
- MySQL
- PCRE
- ZLib

The following PHP Extensions are recommended :-
- ADOdb (Speeds up Database Access)
- GD (Needed for Resizing Images in the Admin Control Panel)
- MySQLi (Needed to Allow MySQL Transactions)

The following PHP Configuration Options are required :-
- 'arg_separator.input' must include '&'.
- 'disable_classes' and 'disable_functions' must not disable any functions used by Viper Cart.
- 'file_uploads' must be enabled to use a number of areas of the Admin Control Panel.
- 'magic_quotes_sybase' must be disabled.
- 'short_open_tag' must be enabled.

The following PHP Configuration Options are recommended :-
- 'mbstring' should be compiled with PHP.
- 'magic_quotes_gpc' should be disabled. It doesn't offer the protection that it was designed to give, and having it enabled will cause performance degradation as Viper Cart will have to undo magic_quotes_gpc's work on every page loaded. Additionally, the magic quotes feature is deprecated and will be removed entirely in PHP 6.
- 'magic_quotes_runtime' should also be disabled for the same reasons as magic_quotes_gpc.
- 'register_globals' should be disabled as it introduces major security issues. Viper Cart attempts to avoid these as much as possible, but this is another very bad feature and will be removed in PHP 6.
- PHP should be set up to send emails. A number of features won't work otherwise.

MySQL
One MySQL Database will be needed to store data such as orders in. We support Version 4 and Version 5 of MySQL. If you are using MySQL 4, you must have version 4.1 or above. We recommend Version 5 over Version 4 however as Version 5 with InnoDB tables is a lot faster to recover from a crash or other unexpected shutdown and is fully ACID compliant which offers maximum protection against a corrupt database.

Space and Bandwidth
Although Viper Cart uses between only 30mb and 40mb (including the database with Post / Zip Code data), we recommend you purchase hosting with a minimum of 100mb of web space and 1000mb of bandwidth.