A lot of steps for just getting one file
If you ever wanted to include PEAR.php in a script, but never installed it before on a shared host, a google search for pear.php download should have solved the problem. On the contrary, following the first links on google is a huge waste of time. In my situation, I only needed pear.php to instantiate a class. The intuitive solution is to just download the file and ftp it to the same location as the file that includes it. That works, except the official installation guide never says that.