Some of the requirements you must meet to install PrestaShop 1.7 are:

If your hosting is based on cPanel and your provider has compiled the different versions of PHP used for the most popular CMS, you should be able to activate PHP 7.

If you do not have the option to change the PHP version available, follow these steps to change the version manually.

Access your cPanel, Files, File Manager and in the user folder (before public_html) edit the .htaccess file with the code editor, or create the file if it doesn't exist.

Add the following code as the only line in the file:

Save the changes and now you have PHP 7 for the entire hosting.

Possibly in your hosting you have more than one website, whether they are PrestaShop (versions 1.4, 1.3 or 1.5) and they require PHP 5.4 or 5.3 but you want to have PrestaShop 1.7 running in another folder.

It is common for your hosting provider to allow you to enable different versions of PHP in different folders of the hosting in order to run multiple CMS with different PHP versions.

If you have the PrestaShop 1.7 website in the /public_html/ps17 folder. You just have to edit the file (if it exists) or create it, and include the following code on the first line:

Save the changes and now you have PHP 7 for this folder of the hosting only, the rest will continue with the global version of PHP enabled in the Hosting.

Then, this .htaccess file will be automatically complemented, when you install PrestaShop 1.7, with the rest of the codes required for this file, but the one that activates PHP 7 will remain at the beginning of the active file.

For new installations, you have to download the ZIP file that contains the installer and all the CMS files from the project's website.

Click on Start now and then fill out the form that appears to access the download file.

Once you have filled in the requested information, click on Download now.

Once the installation is finished, save the .zip file

Access your cPanel and create a database for the installation.

You must write down the database information because you will need it during the PrestaShop installation process (database name, user/s, database password).

You must select the prestashop_1.7.1.1.zip file that you downloaded to your computer and upload it to the hosting folder, in this case, to /public_html.

You can do this via FTP or better from your cPanel, Files, with the File Manager from the top menu option Upload.

Once the .zip file is uploaded to the hosting, you must unzip it using the Extract tool that you will see at the top of the File Manager.

The prestashop_1.7.1.1.zip file, when unzipped, produces several files:

The permissions of the first two files are incorrect, and if you call the installer from the browser, it will return a 500 error due to those permissions.

You simply avoid this by changing the permissions of these files, one by one, using the Permissions option in the top menu, and set them to 644 so that they can be executed.

Now you must open a new tab in your browser and call the PrestaShop installer, you can do this from the domain URL that you will use to use PrestaShop 1.7 or from the temporary URL if you do not yet have a domain associated with the hosting.

This will load the PrestaShop installation process screen on your hosting, which consists of extracting and expanding the files from the prestashop.zip package that you obtained after extracting the downloaded .zip file.

This process may take a few minutes to complete.