Thanks, sundialsvc4!

It's shared hosting, which I think is the norm not to allow FastCGI.

I could opt for the VPS, but that's substantially more expensive than shared hosting and isn't a viable option.

I read up about Plack a little and found it to be quite abstract and I'm not immediately clear how it can help in my case - which is to move from ordinary CGI to faster CGI. Plack might not even be an option in a shared hosting environment, just like FastCGI.