I'd expect even a shared host to have a compiler installed.

When adding a new module to the repository, we just check the downloaded CPAN package into a directory and then run the build script. It finds all CPAN packages in that directory and builds them.

Most of the articles about software deployment and configuration management tend to be about Java, since many LAMP developers do this kind of thing in sloppy ways without much thought. It's only when you get into larger apps that you realize the necessity of thinking through infrastructure like this. However, you may find some useful things in the archives on the http://onlamp.com/ site.