OK. so, time for me to feel stupid for asking the following...

I have hosted webspace and am looking to try out silverstripe (which I have already done on my local machine. uploaded the php installer, and then got stumped when I received a pre-install error saying that the php allocated memory is inadequate. I have only 16M and Silverstripe requires 20M. I have had a moan with my hosting company who say that they will not change the php memory allocation. Is there any way around the php memory check during the install and, is it worth doing or would the performance be that badly affected? I'm not looking to push a vast quantity of content through the CMS.

Hope someone knows the answer!
Thanks

You will be really pushing it to get it to work on 16mb of memory, I think you will find that it will just die. You can try and override the memory in your php file by adding ini_set('memory_limit', '32mb'); to sapphire/main.php. But really even if it installs you are going to have a had time as I would recommend at least 64mb of memory for SS installs