CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. CGI is an interface between your web pages and a scripting language such as Perl or PHP, or programs such as SendMail. Active Web Hosting's CGI server supports Apache SSI, php4, Perl, MySQL and SendMail.

In order to use CGI scripts on your domain, you will need to activate a CGI Account. For more information, see How To Request A CGI Account. Once you have your CGI account set up, you can then install scripts such as web logs (blogs) like Wordpress, forums such as phpBB, counters, tagboards, guestbooks, and more.

The CGI server is a separate server from your web server that you put your web pages on. You can use an FTP program to log into the CGI server and upload your scripts. You can also request to have your entire web site hosted on the CGI server instead of your usual web server. However, you can not place non web-related media such as zip, exe, mp3, avi and mpeg files on the CGI server. Please take note of the file types allowed on the CGI server.

The CGI server is for your own personal use only. You may not let your hostees (anyone you allow to have web sites on your domain) or anyone else access your CGI server, use CGI scripts, or use your MySQL database. If you know someone who needs a CGI server to run scripts, they will need to sign up with Active Web Hosting and obtain their own account and domain. Please see our Referral Program for information on how you can earn credit towards your hosting costs if your friends sign up for an account and give your domain name as a reference.

For more information, please see our CGI Frequently Asked Questions.

Learning About CGI and Scripts Takes Time

If you are new to CGI and want to learn to learn more, please do not be discouraged if you are having a hard time at first. CGI is more for programmers than it is for those who are new to the web and building web pages. It takes some time to learn to use CGI and scripts that run on a CGI server. You can get started by reading some tutorials online and learn to write your own scripts.

Here are some links to further reading:

Online Tutorials:

Books: