A problem in running web2y on shared hosts is that most of them run CentOS and CentOS ships with Python 2.4. Python 2.4 misses some modules that are required by web2py and you need root access to install them.
Another solution is using virtualenv. I seems it is possible to download and run virtualenv without being root and it is possible to use it to easy_intall the missing 2.4 modules thanks to a module called distribute. I wrote a simple script that does this automatically. Please help me test it? If you have an account on a cheap shared web-hosting provider that only provides Python 2.4 just do the following: wget http://web2py.googlecode.com/hg/scripts/setup-virtualenv-web2py.sh chmod +x setup-virtualenv-web2py.sh ./setup-virtualenv-web2py.sh It should download web2py, virtualenv, create the environment you need and start web2py on localhost.
