pear on shared host

Hello This is my first post to the list. I've just started using pear mostly the DB package. Thank you all for your efforts. I've been communicating with my hosting company (qwk.net) over them installing pear for their shared hosting sites (me). I know I can always install it locally and there as been some very informative posting recently about it on this list and I may end up doing that. Anyway, qwk uses "hsphere" and says they can't install pear. I pointed them to the pear manual page on the package manager "pear". But it seems there are some issues with them using the "hsphere" server. Qwk has been very informative and helpful and has instead suggested the I install php in cgi mode and provided the scripts to do it. This way I can use php modules that they may not provide. Though this is over the top for me right now. <snip from qwk> The pear binary is also not shipped with the Hsphere installed php. To get a working pear binary after the fact (php already running) requires the php binary (the module in apache will not alone suffice) unfortunately. However a local install of php in CGI mode will provide you the php binary, the pear binary and the ability to use them however you require. </snip> I am thinking that installing pear usually shouldn't be difficult for a hosting company. Though in this case the problem could be with this "Hsphere" which I know nothing about. Can anybody shed some light on the issue. Thanks for your help. Roland