perldoc perlhist tells me that 5.4.4 was released 15-Oct-1997, and 5.5.3 was released 28-Mar-1999.

That's nearly two years ago. Your ISP is still running a Perl from 4 years ago when there's been a very major upgrade nearly two years ago? I'd get a different ISP before I start worrying about how to get IO::Socket::SSL working, since the SSL module also requires working SSL library, and that's not likely to be there either.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker