Google ReCaptcha - Getting Challenge Response on shared server - php

Question

I have a site that uses the new version of Google ReCaptcha (I am not a robot version), and am having trouble getting the challenge response on my shared server.
I cant use curl or file_get_contents due to restrictions on the server. Is there any other ways to get the response?
The code I was using locally, that does not work on the live site is:
CURL
function get_data($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}
$response=$this->get_curl_response("https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify?secret=SECRET&response=".$_POST['g-recaptcha-response']."&remoteip=".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
File Get Contents
$response=$this->get_curl_response("https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify?secret=SECRET&response=".$_POST['g-recaptcha-response']."&remoteip=".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

Answer 1

This turned out to be a problem with the hosting company that could not be resolved, the challenge response from the captcha was being blocked by the hosting company's firewall, and therefore the capthcha always failed.
Because I am on a shared server they could not enable file_get_contents() as it would be a security risk for all the sites on that server.
I installed PHP Captcha (https://www.phpcaptcha.org/) as an alternative, whoch works fine as all the logic is done locally.