I am however a bit worried about MySQL development on a remote host with no error logs. Is there any way I can see what is not working without the ubiquitous Internal Server Error message?
Yes;
use CGI::Carp qw/fatalsToBrowser/;
This prints nice error messages to the browser; however, if your script dies before compiling, you just get a (fairly) unhelpful "compile error."
If you don't have a command line, maybe you can do your developing on another box somewhere and then move everything to your host? I personally could not bear to write any decently sized script without the debugger.