Hosts Not Providing CGI/Perl?

becoming more and more common.

[OhMyPixel]

I've been doing work for a few clients and the networking person has arranged the hosting situation to replace inhouse boxes because of bandwith issues. Both times the person has signed up the client with web hosts that do not offer CGI/Perl - only ASP (and respective technologies). They don't offer it as an extra either. He didn't do this on purpose and of course the easy solution would be for me to sign up the service.

But that is beside the point. I thought CGI/Perl were standard expectations with most web hosts. Is this technology going out the door?

[Macguru]

No, but maybe this host is. ;)

[OhMyPixel]

Ok, good. I was starting to wonder if I missed something. I sent the hosting company back a nice little e-mail telling him that he couldn't call his company a hosting company if they couldn't provide CGI/Perl. I started introducing him to darwin's natural selection but then I just quit - If he can't understand the need for CGI/Perl then how the hell would he understand the concept of natural selection.

Anybody else with these problems?

[txbakers]

CGI/Perl scripts can open up a server to lots of security problems. If someone were to upload a mailicious script, even in their own CGI-BIN, it has the potential of destroying the entire server.

One hopes that is never the case.

Another reason to not offer it is the operating system. If the host is offering ASP, he's probably on W2000 or NT. If so, many prewritten perl scripts don't run very well on Windows and the host got tired of explaining why.

I run Win 2000 and Perl and have some scripts that won't work, but others that do. It's really a host preference.

If you are looking for new hosts, I would be happy to talk to you.

[richlowe]

I've found hosts which have smaller or more unskilled staffs tend not to offer CGI and perl. They simply do not have the expertise to offer it and be sure of security and support. ALso, of course, windows hosts do not tend support it (at least that's what I've found).

Richard Lowe

[scotty]

If I am running an ISP or hosting company, I will not provide CGI support for all my clients.

CGI, IMHO, is just an expensive way of doing dynamic pages in the HTTP/1.0 days, where each HTTP request requires the operating system to fork a new process to handle that particular request. Forking is expensive - try to create 100's of processes in your own computer, be that Windows or Un*x based, and everything will start swapping like crazy. Moreover, we are talking about the Perl process here, and everyone knows that Perl is not the fastest scripting engine on this planet...

If you are standing from the hosting company's point of view, with the same hardware specification, instead of serving 200 concurrent users with in-process solutions like ASP and PHP, you can only serve 50 users with out-process CGI solution. Which one would you prefer?

[theperlyking]

I'm really not sure that is accurate. Hundreds of processes on my linux box at home wont cause problems and large sites can and do run on perl (slashdot anyone?), not to mention embperl and the various optimised perl options that dont reinterpret the scripts each run (I forget the names of them at the moment :) )

I have to say that any host not offering perl is severely limiting their customer base especially since you can find cheap hosts who do offer it.

[scotty]

Slashdot uses mod_perl, which runs the Perl intepreter inside the Apache process. This way, any new request will not fork a new Perl process as the CGI is running inside the Apache. That's quite useful since you can cache lots of different kind of objects inside the process, without re-construct them again on every request, eg database connection.

However, I think writing mod_perl application is different from writing a CGI application, even though it can be trivial to port an existing CGI app over. mod_perl also has its own problems, like memory leak in your perl app, etc. I am not about the current stage of Perl since I've not been coding in Perl for quite a while. I am a Python person :)

At the end, you are right about saying that hosting companies not providing Perl severely limit their customers. CGI's are easy to develop, deploy and run, and there are alot of existing CGI code out there, ready to be re-used. However, I think in the future, do expect to pay more for CGI service, compare with in-process solutions.

[EliteWeb]

Because of security concerns only aproved CGI scripts are allowed to run in the users cgi-bin. I go over all of the scripts and have a few of my programmers take a look at them. for the most part only trusted peoples are allowed to host on my server anyhow. :) damn hackers.

[caine]

Off course security is a main issue. but i think generally you get what you pay for if you go for the more expensive packages from reputable companies, the access is full on, its when you try to get cheap or pick up free-bees.