Most of the popular hosting companies provide free installations for Drupal users. However if your hosting company is compatible with PHP/MySQL websites, Drupal can still work on your server and these simple steps are required in order to install your new Drupal website.

1. Determine what server/hosting you plan on going with and if it supports a Drupal powered website. Some popular hosting providers can be found here.
2. Navigate to the Drupal website and download the latest stable version of Drupal 6.xx.
   
3. Extract the files from the drupal-6.xx.tar.gz compressed folder (where xx is the latest stable version) onto your desktop, where you can easily locate the extracted folder. To extract .tar.gz compressed folders you can use a popular free file archiver named 7-Zip.
   
4. Rename the extracted folder to your website's domain name for consistency reasons (if the website is www.mycompanyname.com, rename folder to "mycompanyname").
   
5. After signing up with a hosting provider we recommend connecting to the server via a FTP client such as FileZilla or the webpanel that comes batched with your server's account.
   
6. After logging in to your FTP (using username and password provided by your hosting company), locate the public_html (depending on the server it could be named something else. ex: public, httpdocs etc) folder and open it. This is where the extracted drupal-6.xx (or whatever you have named it) folder that we have unzipped earlier will have to be placed.
   
7. The simplest way in order to initialize a blank database for Drupal, is to log into your webpanel and then proceed to your "MySQL Databases" (name may varry depending on your provider) to create the new database. To keep things consistent you should name your database the same as your website ("mycompanyname").
   
8. After you have created a database, proceed to add a user to the database through the webpanel and provide the user all of the privileges. This username and password is important for one of the steps in this tutorial - momorize it.
9. Open a web browser and navigate to your webpage to begin the installation of Drupal. (example: http://mycompanyname.com/install.php)
   
10. If the previous steps have been completed successfully you should see a Drupal installation page window. The first step is to pick your installation language.
    
11. Drupal will most likely give you an error message pertaining to the mycompanyname/sites/default/default.settings.php file.
    
12. Use FileZilla or the File Manager on your server to duplicate this file (default.settings.php) inside of the sites/default/ directory. For this you might have to drag the default.setting.php file to your desktop, rename it to settings.php and upload the newly renamed file back to the default directory, where the default.setting.php is currently located). After this has been performed, you should remove the default.settings.php
13. Right after this step you must make sure to give the owner write permissions to the /sites/default/settings.php file. This can be done through FileZilla by right clicking the file and going to permissions. This is also possible to achieve through the file browser provided by your hosting company. In the numeric value box, type in 777.
    
14. If you got the error in step 11 you can simply press the refresh button and if all was done correctly with the settings.php file, Drupal should continue the installation. The next screen that will appear will be where the database information is required for Drupal to store its information. The database information that we created in steps 7 and 8 has to be entered here.
15. If the database was set up correctly, Drupal will take you to page where you can enter the rest of the information about your website. Simply click 'Save and Continue' when you are done.
    
16. Your Drupal installation is now complete!