Ah that’s the thing, I’ve asked their support and they say it’s fine, and I’ve run a dummy page with phpinfo() in the admin directory and all the settings look right.
Before placing it in the admin folder I had the amended php.ini file in the top-level and that broke the user login page. So from where I’m sitting it looks like there’s something that the functions behind the update buttons don’t like, and I really don’t understand it.
Well it’s shared hosting on 1and1’s server, rather than a private server, if that’s what you’re getting at.
