orbital has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Right now I am in a position where I can no longer use the company server for my personal web hosting, as I was eating to much bandwidth. So I am stuck with the issue of where to have my pages and scripts hosted.

I know there are many choices that allow for cgi scripts and decent disk and bandwidth quotas for a reasonable price. However not a single one that I have come across allows you to add modules, without prior approval by the network admin.

Is co-location my only option?

Is there a web hosting service that caters to the special needs of a perl programmer?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perl orientated Web Hosting
by foo (Beadle) on Mar 19, 2001 at 00:38 UTC
    However not a single one that I have come across allows you to add modules, without prior approval by the network admin.

    You aren't going to be able to add modules without approval from the admins unless you do one of two things. One, get root or some type of admin access or two, compile them into your home directory and use the modules from there. You can check here for how to do the second option.

    In general, approval shouldn't be a problem so I would just look for somewhere that has responsive administrators or, if you want to compile modules yourself, gcc.
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Re: Perl orientated Web Hosting
by brainheart (Initiate) on Mar 19, 2001 at 05:00 UTC

    You should be able to install modules in a non-standard directory without needing root privileges.

    I find hurricane electric (http://www.he.net) to be a pretty decent personal web hosting company (except for the ancient version of perl). You get a mysql account, good reliability, and since you pay by traffic, it's cheap as long as no one uses your site.

    Here's a relevant snippet on how to insall modules in a personal directory from their excellent documentation:

    When you build modules, use the PREFIX option when 
generating Makefiles: 

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/mydir/perl 

then either set the PERL5LIB environment variable before 
you run scripts that use the modules/libraries (see the
perlrun manpage) or say: 

use lib '/home/mydir/perl';

    [download]

    See http://www.he.net/faq/cgi.html#Anchor92183

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[d/l]
Re: Perl orientated Web Hosting
by geektron (Curate) on Mar 19, 2001 at 05:00 UTC
    my solution was to find a DSL provider that will give you a static IP address ( and preferably one who will do zone transfers for free ).

    that, a FreeBSD box running the needed services to act as a gateway/ firewall/ web server, and a domain name, and you never need worry about getting root to install modules, or disk quotas ( need more space, buy another hard drive! ).

    and, in the process, it becomes a way to solidify sysadmin skills.

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