The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Since switching to a Dreamhost shared hosting plan, I’ve been struggling to get used to the fact that using such hosting is far different than tweaking one’s own hardware and software on one’s own DSL link. It’s been interesting. And by interesting, I mean, of course, not so much interesting as painful.
It’s not Dreamhost’s fault. Far to the contrary - had I used their software installer and actually thought ahead as I was trying to move my data, it might have worked the first time. Or possibly, the second. The main complaint I have is that perl and php are running as cgi, not apache modules. For shared hosting this is almost a requirement (running as cgi) from an accounting standpoint - otherwise, code runs as the apache server user and you can’t tell who is driving the box into the ground. At least, not so easily. So, I’ll adapt.