My content marketing service is not able to flow my content properly without the availability of cURL. Discovering it is missing at Winhost was a disappointment and I am hopeful there can be some movement in the right direction. The Knowledgebase article about the lack of cURL has 478 views, and includes a unsubstantiated excuse that there is no x64 platform cURL support. Well, there is-- http://www.confusedbycode.com/curl/ Please bring this normally expected functionality to the Winhost platform!
You're right, the article states there is no 64 bit cURL compilation "At this point in time." But that article was written on 8/14/2009. Note: cURL is available on all Winhost servers. We can't really gauge demand for a feature on the number of Knowledge Base article views, since potential customers and non-customers also use the Knowledge Base. We do take those views in to account, but what really drives adoption of features is our users (or potential users) asking us for something. And unfortunately, over the past 4 1/2 years very, very few people have asked for cURL. If you search for mentions here in the forum, other than this thread there is only one. We also keep a separate record of features people request by email and other methods, and cURL rarely shows up there either. So while I understand that it would be useful for you, it doesn't seem to be something the rest of our users are interested in. At least not interested enough to ask for it. One problem with low-demand items like this is that any feature we add has to be added globally - on every web server (and then maintained on every web server). If only ten people or five people (or one person) wants a feature, I'm afraid it doesn't make sense to install/maintain it across all of our web servers. Sorry.
I understand that you cannot address just any old feature across all your platforms. I actually only need this for PHP, specifically in my WordPress site that is in my Application Pool...it looks like you are actually using PHP 32 bit, as that would be the supported, non-experimental version. So the whole 64bit thing is a bit of a canard, at least for the php world, which I think is where this is mostly needed. For you to support PHP Curl would be a few files and a tweak to the PHP.INI file to support the php_curl extension. I looked at doing this myself with the curl dlls in my application bin folder, but the settings for curl are a system-wide setting so I can't tweak in my own site config.php file. At this point I will give-up on my feature request and ask my content marketing company to work around it, but it does make me feel disappointed in my decision to chose Winhost over GoDaddy, as GoDaddy naturally supports php curl... And, as a software marketer I'm also aware that your existing customers are somewhat self-selecting based on research and advertised available features. So, gauging the value of a feature only on your existing customer base is a form of cognitive bias. What you are failing to measure is the value of this feature to all the would-be customers that reject Winhost after finding you don't have this feature and go somewhere else.
Bill Thorne, we do in fact track what potential users are looking for, so we have a pretty good idea of what kinds of things people want that that we don't offer. If demand for anything is significant, and it's feasible for us to implement it, we implement it. There's really nothing we like more than saying, "Sure we can do that!" and making someone happy that they chose us. That's why we're here, after all. Unfortunately we're not always able to do that.
I'm really sorry for the confusion...what is seriously stupid here is that cURL support in the PHP environment IS ACTIVE AT Winhost. Before I started poking around with a custom php class and the curl dll's in my own bin folder, I wrote a quick little tester, which is at http://thisoldscreen.com/checkcurl.php Sure enough, the curl support is all there for a PHP application. You may want to update that Knowledgebase article because it sure wasted a lot of our time with its blanket statement of no curl support at Winhost.
Ha, well, it goes to show you...something! Your account is on Windows 2012/IIS 8 though, so the KB article may still be valid for Windows 2008. I'll check on that.
For anyone else who has this question or comes across this thread, cURL is available on all Winhost servers.