if MySQL won't work on hypermart, is there any database things that will? i need something that will search through over 500 entries quickly... i have a large database like www.freewebspace.net and it takes forever for the cgi to load the matching quiries

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-Keith
-WebMaster@custom-perl.hypermart.net

Most CGI programs, and perl are using flat-file databases. They are just files, and the cgi/perl program has to go through them from top to bottom. People have tried all sorts of ways around this. A dbm hash file for key=>value pairs is one way, but it's somewhat limited, and your program has to do a lot of work (like links) taking the ID as the key, and the rest of the database entry as value and parsing it.

To use an RDBMS you need to have full shell access and access to a C compiler (usually).

Free webhosting is not designed to give you full function accounts. They are designed to give 80% functionality to 90% of the people.

Once you start going beyond oridinary web pages and the standard cgi forms and guest books, you start entering a different level.

This is where paid hosting begins.

The free hosts are the small businesses that want a web page, and they'll help the successful ones grow.

Paid hosting is the only way to go if you want to run all the fun stuff. Prices vary. SOme will give you great features, but low bandwidth and sluggish performance. For many people that's ok.

I like fast performance, and have always been on my own servers. Dedicated hosting starts usually around $500 or $600. Can be as much as $2,000 or more.

In between, are the $200 packages that offer full hosting, and limit the number of people on a machine usually to 15 or 20 domains. They require you to have your own domain (usually) and will offer 6 to 20 gig of bandwidth and 50 to 5,000 megs of disk space.

Shop around.

You will probably want the ISP that offers most of what you need in one of their standard packages, since getting them to add features can be expensive or impossible.

BTW ...

Links 2.0 handles 500 entries pretty fast. Any slowdowns are probably due to system load, not the ability of Links.

Again free hosts pack 200% of customers into 100% of bandwidth -- if you are lucky. Some page 500% or more. It's the only way they can make money.

You are not going find free hosting offering you the same speed and performance a paid hosting package will. Can't be done.

MySQL won't help if your cpu or pipe is overloaded -- it will actually make it worse.

Hello !


This seems to be very high but also it depends on storage space and related services. For sure to start with my host is one of the best on the internet and they are currectly hosting more than 1,00,000 websites. They charge me about $25 a month for coustom CGI + MySQL + PHP3 and everything really + 80 MB space and what not.

They are : www.pair.com

(The price above is for a shared server. A dedicated hosting I try understand means ones own server and no one in the harddisk. With them such would costs $250 per month and 2 - 3 Gigybyte of space.)

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rajani













[This message has been edited by rajani (edited August 01, 1999).]

Thanks everyone for the ideas, but i really don't have that much to spend... Ive heard about pair.com... i guess ill try them out... does anyone know what kind of database server is the fastest?

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-Keith
-WebMaster@custom-perl.hypermart.net

Pair Networks is nice for smaller links databases.. But when your collection of links grows beyond a certain level you either have to move on to a dedicated Pair server (www.quickserve.com), or simply change to another webhost.

The reason is Pair`s policy regarding cgi scripts. They may only run for (about) 30 seconds, and don`t use more than 3Mb ram.
You can read them at:

http://support.pair.com/policy/resourcecgi.html

They have a "reaper" which automatically kills scripts when they violate those rules... which unfornately happens all the time now for my build-routine... So I am shopping!



Regards

Wilhelm Andreas Eilertsen
webmaster@radiodirectory.com