So, I just installed zenphoto for my roommate and they love it but they ran into a small issue of BMP images not being displayed, at least not the thumbnail. I narrowed down the issue, I think, to the 'imagick' extension not being installed/enabled/available on the server. So, I contacted my hosts support desk, Lunarpages, and inquired about having that enabled/installed on the server I am hosted on. I was informed in the reply that imagick is not available on any of their shared hosting servers, unless I want to shell out for their Dedicated or VPS services.
My main question here is this. Is imagick some type of security risk or very server resource intensive?
I'm mainly wondering this because I've noticed in the past year that Lunarpage has become very nickle & dimey and I just can't figure why this would be some type of restricted extension for whatever reason, which I'm still waiting on a reply from the Lunarpages support team to explain.
Frustrated...