Was not familiar with virtual servers. Are you referring to Xen maybe? Any other general info on them you could provide here might be useful to have in this thread. For example:

• How much admininistration is generally required? Do I usually get Apache2/mod_perl2 by default?
• What software is the provider using to create these virtual servers?
• Any recommendations on virtul server hosting providers?

Take a look at www.nearlyfreespeech.net for a very nice setup and price model. I use them for a couple of small sites.

Virtual private servers - I use Fluidhosting; there's a good explanation of VPS on their site and I'm very pleased with their service. One caution, some hosting plans that are advertised as VPS are really just shared hosting.

My understanding is that with a virtual server you can more or less run whatever software you want. Your costs are generally based on network, storage, and CPU utilization. An interesting offering in this area that caught my attention is Amazon EC2, but I haven't used it myself.

Shared servers suck.

I've had pretty good experiences with shared hosting, as long as the server is running GNU/Linux, I can ssh in, and all I need is CGI. The problem comes in when CGI is no longer fast enough. At that point, I remember that the hosting provider has mod_php and wish there was a "Perl-equivalent" for it.

If they have mod_php you probably don't want to host with them. mod_php is also susceptible to compromise. Most likely they are using fastcgi to run their php or using a php bytecode caching mechanism.


my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];

Are you sure they have mod_php? Many shared hosts run PHP as CGI because they don't trust the security of mod_php in a shared environment.

Rhandom wrote

Most likely they are using fastcgi to run their php or using a php bytecode caching mechanism.

and you wrote

Are you sure they have mod_php? Many shared hosts run PHP as CGI because they don't trust the security of mod_php in a shared environment.

No, I'm not sure. Really? PHP as CGI? I'd just assumed that mod_php was being used. Thank you both. The sites I've dealt with were pretty quick and were getting a fair amount of traffic, and since it was php, I'd just assumed that they running with mod_php. I'll have to make some inquiries to hosting providers. I'd be very curious to know if they're using fastcgi for php, and if I could take advantage of it using Perl.

Perhaps shared hosting setups offering fastcgi are more common than I'd thought?