Understanding CGI scripts

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard method of transmitting information between an application and a Web server. CGI scripts are used to supplement basic HTML pages by making your site more interactive and functional. You can program many useful features with CGI scripts, such as hit counters, guest books, order forms and message boards. CGI is an alternative to Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP).

All of Way2Host's plans support CGI scripts and come with a number of pre-installed scripts. For detailed information on using and customizing these scripts, see Using the pre-installed CGI scripts.

Your plan provides you with your own CGI bin in which you can place your CGI scripts. All CGI scripts should be stored in your /cgi-bin directory so that the Web server will know to execute these scripts instead of just displaying them in a browser. This directory has executable permissions, while your other directories should remain non-executable. You can use your local /cgi-bin directory to store custom CGI scripts that you have written yourself or found elsewhere on the Web.

The path to your /cgi-bin directory is:

/home/[domainname]/www/cgi-bin

CGI scripts can be written in almost any programming language, including C, C++, TCL, Perl, Python, Java and Visual Basic. Way2Host's plans support CGI scripts written in Perl 5.x, C++, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), TCL and Python.