Solr works great for english language, but once you want to have other languages support, you will want to use Lucene directly.

anyway, what if my hosting provider won't let me run Solr or any other java software?

What host doesn't let you run java software? I did a dry run a long time ago with solr and ubuntu under VMware fusion in a half gig VM (or maybe 684 Meg), and it's my impression that solr won't run well in limited memory (sphinx works fine) but it's been a while

You can't run Solr/Lucene properly on Google App Engine(just an example), other software may run better in such circumstances, but its quality is questionable

We used it only for Spanish, it worked well enough (and fast enough). We deployed on bare metal so no hosting provider (appart from the rack space) was in the middle. If you are doing things this "difficult" you'll need at least a VPS of course.

Solr will support any combination of analyzers that lucene supports.