my client gave me access to the shared hosting (that he chose and paid) for a website I'm doing. PHP is running as CGI. I can't change PHP settings through ini_set at all! Is this possible? Is this a standard practice of shared hosting? What I basically need to do is to JUST activate errors! How can they expect someone to work with blank pages as "errors"!
Unless they've seriously locked down settings:
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
should be all you need.