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No, it's not. It's great rather than a problem!
Never go with any shared hosting without caps on the usage of CGI.

The reason is simple:
Regardless of the hardware provided, there are ALWAYS physical limits on CPU power and RAM on every machine. On a shared hosting plan, several accounts are on the same machine and share it's resources. If *any* of these accounts/websites is taking almost all resources, the whole server, hence all the other accounts on the same machine, will suffer. If *any* of these accounts/websites causes the server to crash, then *all* accounts hosted there will be down.

Nowadays it's no longer a question of *whether or not* such things will happen. Rather, it's a question of *when* and *how often* it will happen. It's enough to get hit by searchengines and other bots hammering at one site simultaneously and this site may take all available resources on the box. The server goes down, the host shouts at the account-holder and may kick him out.

Here is what the limits are good for:
Requests exceeding the allowed number of parallel CGI-requests will be served with a polite error message asking the bots to come back later.
The server itself takes care that no other sites are compromised because one account is hammered hard.
Your account won't suffer from other sites taking all the resources.
You won't be held responsible for your site occupying all resources.

Bottomline:
Take care you're on an account with precisely defined limits on CGI usage and book the plan providing the appropriate limits for your requirements!

Note:
Limits are usually specified by *number of simultaneous CGI processes* and *runtime of one CGI process*.
To have an idea of how much CPU resources are used, turn on $benchmark and look at the benchmarks printed at the bottom of the forum pages. You'll rarely see benchmarks of 1 sec or more, usual usage is 0.05-0.30 CPU secs!

We recommend 1&1 for their reasonable limit on shared hosting plans.

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