First of all, I appreciate everyone's responses. : )

To give a bit more detail, I don't have a /home directory per se, but I can create subdirectories within my designated area on the shared host. So it seems like what's described in the guide should work. They are running Red Hat with perl 5.008, whatever that means -- I assume it means 5.8.* -- and I'm on Ubuntu, with perl 5.8.7; So we'll see. I haven't experimented yet, but I'm feeling a bit reassured. My initial searches were only turning up solutions that involved some kind of telnet or SSH connection, so I started to worry...

In any case, I'm encouraged by isync's reminder that, as always, TIMTOWTDI.

By the way, ++ everyone for not telling me to get a new hosting provider!