Question about webhosting
 

Hi folks,

Trying to figure something out for a project I'm working on; how many webhosts support FastCGI? Anyone have any idea on whether it's commonly supported or whether it's something "special".

I would say 30% of virtual hosts support it as it is the only way to allow legacy php4 versus php5 parsing on the same site. Of those, some will prevent environment changes effectively denying clients the ability to run fastcgi processes. Virtual providers tend to dislike it because it creates extra processes running on the machine. Dedicated machines generally have it, but, usually not configured.

We're finding more people using mod_wsgi which is a very similar technology and I believe Catalyst works under it. It isn't as widely deployed as mod_passenger. CGI still has the stigma that CGI is bad -- a carryover from the mid '90s.

If you're asking the question I think you're asking, developing an application that depends on it will probably run into deployment problems putting you into a situation of running a hosted solution, or having a very small list of hosting companies able to use it.

I was in fact asking the question you thought I was asking -- in a way. Working on some TGP/LL scripts that I want to put out on the market as it were, and sort of figuring out what I can get away with on the framework end of things.

CGI isn't necessarily bad, just that Catalyst using it's CGI engine is a slow bitch to start up, takes about 1 second for it to start generating output (and this is just a simple test template that doesn't do anything much), so it does sort of work for an admin interface for a TGP/LL (since it builds static files).

The big problem with Catalyst though is that it needs a shitload of modules to be there for it to work. Catalyst::Runtime isn't installed on most hosts that I know of, and then you get all the things like Template::Toolkit, DBIx::Class, the Unicode/Authentication/Session/etc. plugins for Catalyst, and so on.

I did my initial stuff on Catalyst 5.70 which was a lot better in that regard, 5.80 has been Moose-ified which means you get to deal with another 50 modules purely for Moose.

Ahhh anyway.. ranting here... yes, question answered, thanks :D Time to dig up my old hand-rolled framework I guess :D

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