I failed to find a hosting for my site. Spent almost a week searching but failed. Shared hosting companies declines chatrooms. Echolima agreed with chat but it doesn't work on their server and their support is giving no answer about it. Tried 2 pay-per-use (per GB and per second of CPU time) - no luck. One looks like it's server is overloaded other take only PayPal payment which doesn't work with my country.

So I see the last resort - go for VPS hosting at Remarkable hosting. But I think it's a big overkill: pay almost $35 montg for chat with no more than 20 users, and, I suppose, no more than 2 GB traffic. Maybe you know some shared hosting which allows chatrooms and forums? And some sort of adult content? Not a porn site, but dating site where people may want to place some nude photos in their personal ads.

Does it need to support windows 2000, *nix, ASP, ColdFusion, etc.?

It auctually requires server push mode off or no time limit on CGI scripts.

Why dont you just use an irc client?

Yes, Echolima is right. The chat I like requires no limits on script run time and connection time. It launches the script when client enters chat and script works until he leaves. I think it's better on CPU, disk and of course traffic to push clients only new messages in the chatroom than to run script when client reloads page every 10 seconds. Chat script is a free chat script - http://www.gtchat.de.

As for IRC. There are many reasons for not installing an IRC to web gateway instead of CGI chat. And more hosting companies don't like IRC than heavy CGIs or adult content. Maybe there are a lot of DDoS attacks are coming from IRC users?

Maybe I'll install this chat on my own server to see how it really loads CPU, RAM and disk.

I heard server push won't work with MS browsers. Is that correct?

No. It works fine with MSIE, NN4.08, maybe newer Netscape browsers. There are some minor problems with Opera but it works too. Check http://www.gtchat.de, there are some links to installed and working chats.