Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Do you need CGI Web Hosting?

Most online business need to interact with their clients, take suggestions, feedback etc, and respond accordingly. Even social networking sites use complex CGI programming logic which will let the users of a website communicate with each other. Now, it is very obvious that such scripting cannot be done in plain and simple html. Therefore, we need an engine like the CGI or the Common Gateway Interface, which provides a powerful tool for scripting live web applications and creating dynamic sites, and helps in better, dynamic, presentation of data, as well as interaction with site visitors. Repetitive tasks are automated by the use of CGI. Therefore you would always want to choose a host that provides CGI Web Hosting.

Unfortunately, all web hosting service providers do not offer CGI Web Hosting services. This is also costlier resource-wise as compared to normal static html hosting, and also requires extra “perl" modules to run. However, most professional companies have CGI Web Hosting activated in their plans. This is because a huge amount of modern web applications (web pages that can communicate with other programs, such as data base management programs) make use of CGI Web Hosting. For example, online shopping solutions have become a breeze for a webmaster with the use Integrating a shopping carts in a site is basically impossible by using static html alone, as a shopping cart requires the web application to communicate with a database to collect prices etc. CGI Web Hosting service providers also offer SSL security which can be activated on servers supporting cgi. Order forms, item pricing, images, can be maintained and dynamically updated on the fly.

CGI Web Hosting was initially costly as compared to other hosting solutions but has almost become the standard at this time; however, at present- there are other solutions available also. Almost anything, which can be done using Common Gateway language, can be done in PHP or PERL. CGI Web hosting service providers generally have servers that support all three languages, namely, cgi, perl and PHP.