It's probably a bad omen that I am here talking to myself, but I see others have looked in on this out of morbid curiosity.
I have a client that insists on hosting with 'company A' for about $40-$60/mo. depending on the plan. Normally, I have seen this Hosting companies name around and would have considered them to be a good host. The first time I uploaded my site it went from my devel box(apache 1.3.26 on Win2k with PHP 4.3.0 as a module) to the shared host(Apache1.3.22 on Linux RH8.0 (FreeBSD is what it says it is) with... get this PHP 4.0.6 as CGI!). I was able to get minimal functionality out of the site and even after tweaking the code until my fingers bled, I couldn't get the backend to work at all.
The first hosting plan was giving me Premature End of Script Header errors even when it shouldn't have been (trust me). I attributed this to server config errors and began looking for a new host....
FOUND ONE!!! Excellent host, had the entire site up and running beautifully in no time. Annual cost was the same as the monthly from 'Host A'. Client decides that he is skeptical about Host B (the cheap one that works) and opts for a VPS plan with Host B (the expensive one running stoneage software).
After beating my head in trying to update PHP and Apache, I've come to realize that Host A will not allow this. I have a 'working' install of Apache 1.3.28 and PHP 4.3.3 in a back corner of the hosted drive that refuses to 'go in the right place' because I don't have file permissions to copy into the correct directory. I cannot chmod this to work... Telnet(SSH) has failed to allow me to chmod it.
Once again it seems that Host A is requiring me to use their archaic and buggy solutioons for 12X the price of a working Host.
--Pardon the rant, but I needed to vent
