Converted the AJAX search and fixed some things on the front page.
I accidentally clicked on a PERL page on the site a few days ago and apart from the DB connection part, it actually seemed to work....
So maybe the host now does support the Perl library I was using or something else changed...

Oh well. It's almost converted to PHP now anyway, so I'm continuing.
When I have it converted to PHP and gone live. I am then planning to convert to Ruby on Rails and have a play with hosting it on AWS.
I need to get some experience with AWS and this seems like a good project to do it with. Lots of options though, but I think EC and DB on EBS might work for RoR for the lowest cost option (when the free tier year ends).