I've some experience on this matter from both sides of the fence
as a mod_perl programmer and inside experience with
a hosting company.
My experiences as a mod_perl programmer would lead me to believe that
the users running mod_perl on Apache have to trust each other. End of story. This
pretty much rules out mod_perl hosting IMHO.
You could run multiple apaches on multiple IP addresses but this
means your server is going to need a lot of RAM and some trust of the users. Our e-commerce server
(mod_perl/Apache) frequently has 50 Mb mod_perl processes - this just isn't
going to be acceptable to an ISP.
I think the only way you'd get this to work is to run virtual
processors using vmware or IBM's linux on a mainframe. This would then hard limit
the resources each subserver could use and make sure there was no
interaction between users. You could probably only run a few dozen per
server though making it a premium service.
I hate to admit this but PHP is a lot easier from the ISP's point
of view. In fact it is easier to manage than CGI which can easily
cause a server to get out of control if you aren't careful.
I wish there was a half way house for mod_perl which wasn't
so embedded into the web server but still had the advantages
of persistent processes. There is always FastCGI I suppost...
My conclusion is that if you want to run mod_perl you'll have to
get your own server (or club together with some friends). |