Is it considered rude to ask one's host to install a certain piece of software?

I have a site with several image galleries, and if my host had gdlib or imagemagick installd things would go a lot more smoothly for me. Would asking my host to install one of these be kosher?

=THanks

WoodShedd,

I don't think that's rude at all. I know many hosts will install/provide this software on their servers free of charge. Seeing as the install isn't too complex, and many users would benefit from having such software installed, I don't think it is an unreasonable request at all.

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

Thanks for the reply.

Before I ask to have it installed, what sort of load would automatic thumbnail generation put on the server? I don't want to cause any problems

Originally posted by WoodShedd
Thanks for the reply.

Before I ask to have it installed, what sort of load would automatic thumbnail generation put on the server? I don't want to cause any problems

... Quite a bit. Those programs are some of the most CPU intensive there are. Why not batch process them with a program such as ACDSee or something along those lines?

Macromedia's Director best if used with Dreamweaver

Unless you update thousands of pictures a day, I doubt that generating the thumbnails on the server would be too draining.

But personally, I use easy thumbnails (freeware from fookes.com)and do it on the client side.

We already have gd installed on all of our servers, and would probably have no problem installing imagemagick on a server by request of a user. It would probably even get pushed to the other servers for the monthly update if there were no problems.

Those types of requests are not unusual for us.

This is a very reasonable request - esp. because stuff like imagemagick, gd, etc. can be installed once globably and then becomes a feature for all users to use.

The most common reason you are going to see a host not want to do this is:

a.) they use a pre-configured server where they can't risk screwing things up by adding non-approved apps

b.) they have a tight production environment where even though they aren't bound by a particular hosting architecture they still want to make sure all servers are 100% the same.

Regarding load, we have lots of people with the php gallery script on our servers and I don't think it adds to the load much at all (reasonable use of course!). Moderate use of mysql, etc. is going to cause more load then imagemagick would.

Greg