Hi y'all,
I'm a bit of a newbie and seem to be getting my fingers burnt on this web mallarky. I have a site designed ( sort of ) and have signed up with my second web host but have found each time that there are restrictions on what I want to do - i.e.
i) use the image manipulation library in PHP - GD library
ii) offer my visitors a search engine so that they can search the web and the results are displayed ON MY SITE - rather than open a new window to yahoo or whatever.
There are loads of scripts in PHP and perl to do this ( anaconda, matasearch, cybercrawl etc. ( some free some expensive ) but with my previous host providers they don't work because they do not allow something called sockets permission?
Does anyone know of a host provider ( not too expensive ) that can do this?
Any advice greatly appreciated.
cheers
ally

Oh I forgot to add some of the info I have received when trying to sort this out...

"Q. can we connect to 'www.yahoo.com:80' with our new TCP/IP socket? A. failed - unable to connect - Permission denied - Permission denied. Warning: Socket.pm functionality with stdio not confirmed."
"Some web hosting providers do not allow their users to use sockets in CGI programs. If you encounter this problem, your hosting provider policy is probably to blame, since real TCP/IP problems usually return "Unknown error" rather than "Permission denied". If you experience this problem, contact your web hosting provider and request sockets permission..."

When I did contact one of them this was the reply..


"....for security reason, we block access to Port 80 with our Firewall. This is necessary in a shared hosting environment and you need to be on a dedicated server running the risk of attack with the port open. Leaving access open would be ludicrous and would compromise the security of users on the shared server"

Is this the case and is everyone who is using these search engines and 'grabbers' on dedicated servers?

cheers again
ally