I would also suggest to make a look at Jifty. It's installable in your home dir (together with half of CPAN :-), has support for fastcgi which is often supported by providers and enables you to write a web application in a day (together with authentication, edit screens, ACLs and all the other boring stuff). Easy upgrade path (for example when you want to deploy new version on server) is just a added bonus.

However, I have been programming for the web for 10+ years, and it might be that I just got lazy. Having been exposed to 4GLs in 1995 or so, I still have a hard time investing effort into writing every peace of my app. If just deployment is the problem, I would suggest to move your hosting on one of virtual machine providers where you can get all root access.