I was lucky. I was able to upload cgi myself. It was just too much hassle for little gain (whatever security exploits you'd get in PHP, you'd get writing your own C code).
Oh, and how can I forget, mod rewrites were a terrible pain, so if you wanted your website to be dynamic (so you can have, say, your login name at the top corner), you'd have to make your website look like http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/main.pl?url=/directory/page5
Oh, and how can I forget, mod rewrites were a terrible pain, so if you wanted your website to be dynamic (so you can have, say, your login name at the top corner), you'd have to make your website look like http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/main.pl?url=/directory/page5