Shared hosting recommendations for custom modules/extensions

future_man

Hi,

I'm looking for recommendations for a good, cheap, shared server that supports user's custom PHP modules/extensions.

I have a custom PHP module that I can compile for whatever version of PHP the server is running and upload it preferably to a local dir on my account and point to it in the extension_dir path in a custom php.ini.

I was pretty close to getting this to work on one of the more popular shared hosts, but the version of PHP there was compiled with shared extensions and I couldn't get the extension_dir to look in both places (is that even possible?).

Since they wouldn't move my custom module into the shared dir, I was SOL. I also tried copying the shared modules into my local dir with the custom module, but that caused other problems.

Any recommendations? The person who wrote the custom module said that he has it running on a shared server and the extension_dir set to './' in the php.ini.

Thanks!

bpat1434

I don't know of any shared hosts that will allow user-submitted modules to be included in their distributions. It causes many concerns for hosts (security, stability, general usage and such). So I can't see any host to use your own module.

One thing you could do is get a VPS and do it yourself. It's less-costly than a dedicated server; however, you share resources with the other VPSes that are on the same machine.

I do know of an alternative (that's about as affordable as a high-end shared host) which is from Flosoft.biz. They're calling it FlexServ which is a dedicated box with shared space. I'm not promoting them, but without a VPS or Dedicated or Flosoft.biz's FlexServ, you can't get your module loaded.

PHP doesn't allow multiple spots to look in for modules, you can only have one. So your module would be available to any script that uses that version of PHP.

Hope this helps, sorry you didn't get the answer you wanted.

With respect to your friend running it in a shared server with "./" as the php.ini value, that's just saying that the extension directory is the current php.ini directory. Nothing to do with the current scripts directory. So he could be loading it via [man]dl/man but most good php hosts disable this for security reasons.

future_man

Thanks for the reply. He is using dl() to load the custom module on his shared server.

Regarding the "./" for the extension_dir, some servers allow you to have a local copy of the php.ini in the doc root. In his case, its in the same directory as the script and the custom module...so it all works.

bpat1434

Yes, that's true. However, it's still a security issue in many ways. If a user who modifies php.ini to allow dl() or exec() or shell_exec() puts up an insecure script that gets hacked, it's the host (not necessarily just the user) that gets held liable. So in many instances, php.ini is global, and you can modify the ini settings for each script using ini_set(). This is much safer since they can "restrict" what you can and can-not do.