Normal hosting facilities let you do pretty much anything you want, unless you start causing problems for the ISP or their customers. You pay them to provide bandwidth, space, power and cooling. There are more restrictions for shared virtual sites (i.e. the $10/month web sites). Usually they just let you upload PHP and HTML pages and access a MySQL database. But, as Brandon pointed out, even they usually let you do basic things in PHP such as sending email. - Laird Popkin, CTO, Pando Networks mobile: 646/465-0570 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brandon Galbraith" <brandon.galbraith@gmail.com> To: "Nathan Ward" <nanog@daork.net> Cc: "nanog" <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 1:45:03 AM (GMT-0500) America/New_York Subject: Re: EC2 and GAE means end of ip address reputation industry? (Re: Intrustion attempts from Amazon EC2 IPs) On 6/23/08, Nathan Ward <nanog@daork.net> wrote:

Do 'normal' web hosting providers allow customer created scripts to create TCP sessions out to arbitrary things?

Doesn't PHP provide a fair amount of TCP functionality that can be used simply by uploading the code you need to your shared web hosting account? -brandon