I am on shared hosting. I have installed drush version 8.1.15. The webroot is USER/public_html.

I have tried installing Drupal 7, by executing drush dl drupal-7.x. This installs a drupal folder one step higher than the public_html folder. When I perform a drush site-install from this folder, it is successfull. But I cannot use Drupal, because (obviously) it does not reside in the web root.

When I copy all files to public_html myself and try to install Drupal with drush site-install, I get the message that it needs a higher bootstrap.

I now have ‘solved’ this by aliasing the drush command and forcing the web root with -r. But I would lik to know why it does not work properly in order to avoid future problems.