Does Your Hosting Provider Do This For You?

If you are thinking of getting a hosting provider, one of the key things to look for is if the hosting provider is going to support installing additional modules. Most hosting solutions come with a list of Perl modules (same might go for PHP, Ruby and other languages you are interested in), but sometimes using some software requires additional modules.

Module installation can be provided in two ways by hosting providers that I am aware of. My knowledge is based on Hostgator. One option is to log a ticket and they install the module at the site level, that is, all the websites on that server can start using that module. The other option is to have it at the user level. That is, rather than logging a ticket, you can directly use the cpanel and search and install the module that you want.
They even provide a small snippet of perl code that needs to be put into the BEGIN {} block to make use of the modules installed at the user level. The code essentially includes the extra path to the user level perl modules to the @INC variable.

While user level modules work most of the time, there are times that’s not possible. Some of the perl modules require not just perl code but some C code. Compiling C code requires a cc/gcc compiler and Hostgator doesn’t allow users to do this. But simply logging a ticket would be sufficient for them to install it at the site level.

Recently, one user who wanted to use my software needed to install a perl module. He uses GoDaddy. He came back and told me there is no option to install extra module. It’s almost a deal breaker. But luckily, this specific perl module is pure perl code and so I gave the module code and asked him to put it with rest of the script.

I suggest that you always make sure your hosting provider can support your needs.

AJAX and 403 Error

You would think people who have websites that get no more than a thousand page views and a few hundred unique visitors have a far more easier life than those admins of the likes of Google and Facebook. To the most part that’s true. But then, even small admins like us face issues for no fault of us.

I have exactly such a small website that has been working just fine and I hardly maintain it. But then, one fine day, I realized that the records in a table were not getting inserted. Initially I thought it may be related to the sqlite db getting too big or corrupt. But it was just fine. Then, I thought the error might be with the AJAX library that I use from Google’s jsapi and moved to the latest version of prototype.js library. Even that didn’t help.

After a bit of one of those pulling my head moments, searching on the web gave me a clue. The script that inserts data into this table has a parameter whose value is a URL. But apparently if you have mod_security installed, it has some rule called 10_asl_rules.conf that triggers a 403 Forbidden error. Who would know that, unless you end up in this type of a scenario? The hard part is, for the large companies their admins would know what changes are being made to their infrastructure (or atleast that’s how it should be). But for small website owners who just get a shared hosting from web hosting company, they have no control. And these web hosting companies don’t realize that it’s their responsibility to inform their customers of upcoming changes and warn them of the repercussions. This is the second time in less than 6 months that my web hosting provider has screwed up things for me. The previous screw up was related to making my domain to be some remote mail server based or something like that because my MX entries (which I wanted for inbound email) point to a Google Apps based servers. So, my outgoing emails that I generate from the website stopped getting delivered. After noticing that none of the registered users were confirming their registration for a few months, I had to dig deep and find out what was going on with the emails. The support guys, after a lot of back and forth, finally tell me that they did this change a few months back.

If you are working for a web hosting company or an executive of one, please take this as a sincere and serious advice that you shouldn’t be changing the configurations without informing your customers.

List of Available Perl Modules

I use a free hosting website for a domain of mine. I couldn’t find a webpage with all the available perl modules supported by the hosting company. So, I used the following script to figure out what modules are available.


#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-Type:text/plain\n\n";

map {
print "$_\n";
my $cmd = "find $_ -name '*.pm'";
system($cmd);
} @INC;


So, by accessing this page from the website, I could figure out all the modules available.