Let me explain.

I'm working on a new web project at the moment (not appropriate to go into it here), and am considering writing a custom database type program that's tailored to the project's needs. The database program would be a C executable. It would be persistent - holding the database in RAM and backing up on disk on a regular basis. Furthermore, it would use sockets to await commands from a perl script. The perl script is what users on their browser actually access, and obviously, the perl script may have several instances at any one time (only one ever instance of the database). The perl script would use sockets to send commands to the C database, which would complete the request and send data back to the perl program.

Why? Because a born and die perl script that has to read data from files, sort it out, link it together, query and return is far too inefficient - and the number of instances is proportional to the amount of RAM you're using (and wasting). The centralised database would mean X amount of RAM was used at any one time, and very little more. Not having to read in data all the time, of course, makes the program far more efficient and faster.

Granted - nothing new. I could probably use MySQL or something for the task. But the question is - do web hosts object to their clients having such continuously running programs (like the C database) on their server?

In general, yes. I suspect that the majority of web hosts would have your account suspended within a matter of hours of a system like that going online on one of their shared servers. Of course, if you were renting a dedicated server, that'd be a completely different story.

Now, that's not to say you won't find a web host who will host your application. It's possible. If you don't have the budget for a dedicated server, then I suggest you contact web hosts that otherwise meet your needs and ask them - be up front and honest about how much memory this thing is going to use (test it first on your own machine, under real-world load), specifically how it will all work, etc. You might be able to convince a host to host it for you. But you'll probably end up paying more for it, and I suspect that you'll end up with a lower-quality host than you otherwise would since most high-quality hosts wouldn't touch that thing with a 10 foot pole.

But you probably can find a host that would work with you if you look hard enough. Or budget for a dedicated server and you could use virtually any provider you chose.

Good luck in your search! FYI, don't come knocking on our door - we couldn't accommodate your application ;)

Thanks,

Jason

Ah, thanks Jason. I haven't actually written the application, I've just been looking into possibilities to make a half-written application more efficient. That was one, but I suspected that most hosts wouldn't want anything to do with it.

I'll see what else I can think of then...

As president of a web host, I would have some questions about you continously using resources. Under are addition of an ensim control panel, the ability to create private servers gives you the ability to maintain a dedicated server without the overhead. I do agree that most hosting companies would not be happy

Normal web hosting companies would not like this... but you can most likely have this on a VPS, where you have everything including root access on a shared server. Those are usually a bit more expensive though.

Most hosting companies typically are not going to like that. You could however set argv0 to "pine" and hope they just think you are running pine. :-)

Don't give him any ideas Nick!

Matt

How to set up a VPS? is it possible in linux ?