If you're like me, then you'd occasionally like to experiment with different programs and web application frameworks on your shared hosting service.  You may want to set up private version control repositories to try out different systems and check out web-based frontends.  Either way, if you don't have full control over the web server, there will likely come the day that you want to play with something that your web host doesn't support out of the box.  If this requires compiling a binary for your web host, then you have a few options.  Here I discuss ways to gain access to the gcc compiler suite on your web host.