I'm trying to do this on a commercial web hosting service so I don't have access to the more non-mainstream solutions mentioned.

Please see Yes, even you can use CPAN - if you have shell access to the machine, it's very likely you can install modules there, using something like local::lib, and sometimes it's possible even if you don't have shell access. Personally I'd prefer to help you with that rather than some other hacked solution :-)