Many web hosts run PHP under CGI, rather than running mod_php, because of the security issues, which are the same as running mod_perl or any other interpreter with the same permissions as the web server.

For perl, you have 4 choices:

• Use CGI. It's no slower than the PHP scripts being run under CGI.
• Find a host that runs mod_perl. There are several of them and they're not that expensive.
• Find a host that offers virtual servers. These give you a virtual machine with root and are quite cheap.
• Find a host that offers FastCGI. There are plenty of these, and perl runs fine on FastCGI.