Pear Installation Issues at Hosting Provider

Hi, I am getting to know the pear stuff which looks very promising to me, but mayby you can can help me clarify something. Installing the latest version on my own development machine is not a problem, but I wish to use the pear extention on a site which will be hosted by a provider. To them I am nobody. While /urs/local/lib/php/pear is present the dates are from the 11 june 2001, and is prob the version that came with php 4.0.5 which they are still using. I know that they will be going to 4.1.* soon and that will update the pear to so I could use that. Now my question, is it possible to have your 'own' installation of pear? Can I install the cvs files in my own home directory and use them without conflict? I'll setup the .htaccess to include the new directory. php_value include_path .:path/to/my/site/dir/and/then/into/pear/ If this would be possible it means I can update the pear stuff whitout waiting for the provider. What other issues should I consider? Are any other solution, I should look into? If someone could help me out here, that would be great... Thank you, Bas K