Support Start > Web Hosting Technical Information > Installing and Configuring Custom Scripts > Script Policies > Background and Batch Processes

Our script policies allow you to add interactive features to your website. That means you can add blogs, forums, feedback forms, and just about anything else you can imagine.

The only thing we don't allow are “background processes” or “daemons” (software programs that act as servers), programs that aren’t really related to running your website and email service, or large “batch processes”. In particular, the following won’t work:

• Programs that open new listening “ports” on the servers.
• Programs that perform CPU-, memory- or disk-intensive tasks that aren't part of the ongoing process of serving website files in an efficient manner. Examples include batch conversion of audio, video or image files (such as batch resizing or optimizing of hundreds of JPEG images in a short period of time, converting many “.wav” files to “.mp3” files, or re-encoding video files), compressing large files, or using databases to perform large amounts of statistical calculations. These kinds of tasks should be performed on your own computers, with the resulting files being uploaded to our servers.
• IRC programs such as “IRC bots” and “Eggdrops”.

In addition, programs should generally run for only the time necessary to handle incoming requests, then exit (FastCGI scripts are okay because even though they may keep running for few minutes, they soon exit if there are no more incoming requests).

For more details about our script policies, please see the topic Script Policies.