<p>A little background here: I have worked for a long (maybe too long) time with <span class="caps">PHP</span> and for a year now I am doing all my web development with Python with Pungi, my microwebframework. Since my early days at <a href="http://www.terravista.pt/">Terr&#224;vista</a> I&#8217;ve always used shared hosting. It fitted my needs for <span class="caps">PHP</span> and MySQL support.</p>

<p>I am still on shared hosting (ideias3 is hosted at <a href="http://www.dreamhost.com">dreamhost</a>) and I keep planing to use since it&#8217;s way cheaper. I am enjoying Dreamhost, I have all the stuff I want there, (virtually) unlimited storage that I don&#8217;t imagine using even 50% of it. It also comes with some goodies such as Jabber and <span class="caps">SVN</span> support. Of course I would like a dedicated server, where I could run my own stuff (jabber bots, experimental stuff) and even a git server (yeah, I am planing to move some of my code to git). But I don&#8217;t want to afford that, and for running <span class="caps">PHP</span> apps, dreamhost is doing fine. I have a bunch of e107s and Wordpresses there. None of them are vital information. If you are looking for a stable hosting forget dreamhost. Has too many downtimes in their machines and runs a bit slow sometimes.</p>

<p>When I built Pungi, I made it in order to work through <span class="caps">CGI</span> since it would run (almost) everywhere. Those are my needs! I later implemented a Fast-cgi <span class="caps">MVC</span> way of running it (inspired a bit by <a href="http://webpy.org/">web.py</a>, <a href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> and <a href="http://mariz.org/blog/2007/jun/08/simple-wsgi-middleware-dispatcher/">Nuno&#8217;s dispatcher</a>) but I went through hell to get it working. <a href="http://buzz.ideias3.com">Buzzwords</a> is the only project that runs it. I&#8217;m back with <span class="caps">CGI</span>, I know it&#8217;s slow but I don&#8217;t feel it. Since I only use it for simple applications (that&#8217;s the target of pungi) it runs fine without any trouble.</p>

<p><a href="http://kosmaczewski.net/2008/01/09/starting-with-django-in-leopard/">I&#8217;ve set up Django in my Leopard</a> and it was pretty easy and I know it&#8217;s possible to <a href="http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Django">run django applications on Dreamhost</a> but they don&#8217;t offially support it. Even web.py is <a href="http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Web.py">too troublesome to install</a>. So I&#8217;m sticking to old <span class="caps">CGI</span> with pungi for my websites. I know it&#8217;s sad, but it&#8217;s what runs smoothly in my shared hosting.</p>

<p>We also have a bunch of Rails applications running in Dreamhost, <a href="http://sergiosantos.info">S&#233;rgio&#8217;s blog</a>, <a href="http://twitternotes.com">TwitterNotes</a> and some projects still in dev stage. Once in a while the application stops and we need to manually reset the fast-cgi process. I say &#8220;we&#8221;, but it&#8217;s all S&#233;rgio&#8217;s work, since he is the Ruby on Rails guy here.  Well, there is a <a href="http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/07/how-ruby-on-rails-could-be-much-better/">post on DreamHost official blog</a> in which the lack of shared hosting support in Rails is a real problem. I agree: Rails will never be the next <span class="caps">PHP</span> if they can&#8217;t support it. John Gruber explains that the power of Rails is in being easy to code and not to deploy(as in set up environment and all). You can&#8217;t have both.</p>

<p>There are a few <span class="caps">PHP</span> <span class="caps">MVC</span> frameworks (<a href="http://www.symfony-project.org/">Symphony</a>, <a href="http://www.cakephp.org/">CakePHP</a> and <a href="http://codeigniter.com/">CodeIgniter</a>) that do more than the 20% features of Rails that 80% of programmers use and works almost everywhere. Alhouth I hate <span class="caps">PHP</span> for its nasty syntax and language nature and evolution, the modphp for apache is the key for a quietly <span class="caps">FTP</span>-upload-only deployment. That and <a href="http://code.google.com/p/hkit/">hKit</a> are making me wondering if I should get back to do some PHP5 stuff again.</p>