Lieutenant_Skat - 6:33 pm on Jul 15, 2002 (gmt 0)

Well, traditionally, CGI always launched a new process for each new request, which can be a resource hog, if there's a lot of traffic. On Unix (on some flavour of which you'd presumably be hosted), Apache 2.0 pre-emptively forks to provide processes that are ready to meet demand, and also features multiple threads running within those processes. The multiple threads thing is something that was previously a feature of the Windows version because the WierdOS was never very good at handling multiple processes, but it does add to the scalability of the server load (whilst the running of multiple processes generally adds stability: if one process fall over, the site itself doesn't die).

Your own needs may be small, but since a single serve can actually host dozens of different sites, and any host is unlikely to give you your very own Cobalt blade all to yourself, you may want to think about the load that the actual machine is likely to be running.

I'd also suggest that any host running PHP as CGI rather than mod, is either a fairly conservative organisation, or just not up to speed with how best to use their own hardware. Just my 2 Flanian Pobble beads :)! If someone thinks what I've written is wrong or misleading, do shout me down.