Developed as a specification for transferring data between a web hosting server and a CGI script, CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is designed to accept and return data that conforms to a strict specification.

The program doesn't have to be programming language specific, it could be written in any language including C, Perl or Java. CGI is a server-side language as the processing occurs on the web hosting server.

CGI scripts are a common way to communicate dynamically with website users, for example many HTML pages contain forms to collect contact information, these can be submitted via a CGI script.

All standard FastVision web hosting packages come with full CGI support.