As others have said this is a function in many respoects of the hosting company. I have used many over the years and have finally come to the conclusion that it is easier to run my own servers than to rely on hosting outfits! So about 6 months ago I bought a bunch of new machines and put them in a colocation facility.

Others are right when they say that there are indeed many small CPAN modules, I have some I use which are Per Perl and are no more than 20 lines of code! Small enough for ya? The whole idea of CPAN is reusability, so of course module writers will tend to use proven code in the form of CPAN modules rather than reinvent the wheel.

If you are using a shared machine look for a small reseller who is using CPANEL. Check out webhostingtalk.com and see if you can get a recopmendation for a reliable one. Many of these resellers or small hosts have boxes in larger centres using the CPANEL/WHM management system. CPANEL usually installs a lot of modules and additional ones can very easily be installed by the sysadmin from his own GUI. Only very rarely does he need to actually download and compile manually. The CPANEL system uses the CPAN module to do the installation.

jdtoronto