Ok, I read the nightmare horror story about Hostgator, which reminds me of Hostmerit, whom I left last year for not honoring the extra fee I paid for addon-domains. I looked at Dreamhost's page, but they want you to pay 5 or 10 yrs in advance to get any kind of good rate, or charge you $50/setup if you want to go monthly. So Hostgator and Dreamhost are out.
Right now I'm on Servage, and mostly they're fine; they serve my needs for my various adult sites without any problems, but Drupal is so db intensive, their db servers are just not up to it -- I click something, and even with a normally very fast ADSL connection, I sit there and wait almost a minute sometimes for anything at all to happen, and that never happens with regular HTML sites. What I really need is a good host for my Drupal site, with fast db servers, to which I might later add other domains without a lot of drama/trauma/expense.
Oh, and I went and checked out drupal value hosting in response to that 75% discount advertised here, but unlike the $20/mo mentioned here for their "super duper monster servers", I found that the price is actually $40/mo, so 75% off still leaves you paying $10/mo, and for a site which doesn't yet have any income, that's too much; plus I get a bad feeling when one price is advertised here and I go there and find it's actually double.
So I'm wondering about Bluehost; they're very inexpensive, which suits me fine; how is their speed, on db-intensive sites like Drupal? Any horror stories about them?
Any other hosts that might serve up Drupal at some reasonable speed, without costing my firstborn child?
thx much,
Andria
Comments
Hosting
Check these hosting coupon codes in order to reduce cost.
Also you mentioned adult sites, but note that Bluehost doesn't allow any kind of adult content.
Andrew
Yeah, I knew that about
Yeah, I knew that about Bluehost already; I'm fine keeping those on Servage, since they don't have or cause any problems (and Servage is so inexpensive!). It does seem a little odd, though, since "blue" is often a synonym for "not for children". But I know a lot of hosts disallow it not so much for moral reasons, but because of the high traffic load associated with those kinds of sites.
I went into Bluehost's knowledgebase this morning, and they also want either a whole year or 6 months up front; however their BBB history is about the best I've found so far, only 5 instances in 36 months, so they're not out of the running; I just may have to wait a while to afford a whole or half year up front.
But I still don't know how their db servers' speed compares to other hosts, and that is, to me, the most crucial issue in this host-search.
Thx much for that link; that will be very helpful to both find and afford some new host!
Thx
Andria
I've Got a Bluehost Account
I've been hosting 2 sites on a single Bluehost account for a couple of months now and will soon be adding a 3rd, they seem pretty responsive, I paid for 2 years upfront for about $160 and then for an add-on domain recently. I'll admit that traffic isn't very high on these sites though.
So far, no hidden charges and no hassle adding more domains.
Here's a link, judge the speed for yourself www.catcomsjournal.org
Prices
Hi Andrea,
I would like to clarify, that these are drupal.org community specific promotional prices.
Many hosts give away almost 100% of their 1st year revenues to the affiliates bringing in the customers, and then cutting corners on service and infrastructure.
At DVH, we would rather give away 50% discounts to the paying customers and spend the rest on infrastructure (and keep the business reliable).
For your needs you can try our BlowoutPackage2008 as well. That will cost $5/month only with the 50% discount coupon code.
If you are not happy with the speed and performance, full refund guaranteed. So far, the customers hosting on this package have reported that the performance exceeds all hosting companies they have been with, and we even had a happy webmaster telling us that she has experienced better performance than her VPS account with her existing hosting company!
You will find many independent benchmarks comparing DVH with Media Temple Grid Service, BlueHost, Siteground and others on the drupal.org hosting forums. It will be great if you can kindly consider DVH as a possible hosting alternative.
I would be happy to answer more queries.
Regards,
Steve
http://www.DrupalValueHosting.com
Not an Affiliate
...and don't own Bluehost either!
Ah!
hi gmt2027,
The way drupal.org forums shows a thread, each comment comes below the other one, even though i just wanted to address the post by the OP. Nothing was directed at you! It was a generic statement on the condition of the hosting industry. :)
Regards,
Steve
I've been on BlueHost for
I've been on BlueHost for over a year and have had few problems.
Their attention to their customers has been great. Their offerings are too many to mention here.
I also work with a local BSA (Boy Scouts of America) council that has their hosting on Hostmonster.
Both of these companies are in the same building and under the same ownership.
Both offer excellent service and a large array of features. Bluehost is around $7.95/month and HM is a little less.
I would have no hesitation in recommending either one.
Any horror stories about Bluehost?
Read about my horror with Bluehost.
I would NEVER, EVER use Bluehost again.
In my search for a new
In my search for a new provider I found many posts in the net about bluehosts problem with resource intensive cpu thing. I am not quite sure and don't nail me on it, but i think I read about 100mb ram usage is allowed. ( Compared to others this is good )But they are limited in cpu things ;( My favourite in this moment is mmhosting. But there are nearly no reviews. Either bad or good....
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www.u-r-reality.de
A social development project
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There are limitation of Bluehost
Bluehost does has some restiction for each account in their server, such as only 25 concurrent connection, etc. But considering it targets to small business market, usually, if your web site has less than 2000 visits per day. I think it should be totally fine. ( I host my drupal site there, with around 1000 visits per day, looks great so far, so I say 2000 visits here).
And the support from is excellent. Very prompted.
Bluehost are simply unreliable
I have wordpress installed on bluehost, and their availability has been terrible over the last half a year. They think it's completely fine for the site to go down for a couple of times a day. Stay away. You get what you pay for, if at all.
Amit
To Each His Own
I would have to disagree about BlueHost or Hostmonster. They're both in the same building and owned by the same company. I have web sites on both of these and their support has been superior. I don't recall any significant downtime since I've been with them and that's been over a year.
However, I would also agree that there are those who have experienced issues. No host is perfect. They're all subject to hardware failures, D.O.S. attacks, etc which they have to deal with.
I have also not compared the two hosts I have with any others, so I don't have that knowledge.
All I can say is that it works for me.
To Each His Own.
though I would add a comment
In my search for a host with faster db servers, I finally found one called usmanbiz.com, and yeah, they're really fast -- when they're up. I've been on them for about 2 months now, and their uptime can't be more than 75%, on average. First, it was that their bw provider had problems, causing them to crash servers a lot. That caused a lot of downtime. Then they decided to move to a new datacenter/bw provider, which would be "8x faster". It might be, but that move engendered an upgrade to their cPanel, which brought with it a buggy version of apache 2 and the internal server error 500 blues -- more downtime while they fixed that. In the past week, they've been up more than down, so maybe things are finally smoothing out; if so, then it's a good value, $3.95/mo, and pretty dang fast even with all the db stuff of drupal, and I have to say, their tech support isn't bad at all; they respond fairly promptly, they act like they care, and will devote pretty serious time to a customer's script problems. So I'm crossing fingers; I have another month before my first paid quarter runs out, and one other host which I can afford that appears to be very fast and offer the various perks I require, however at last check, they hadn't yet upgraded to php5, but said it was "coming soon." They acted as if they really wanted my business, so perhaps they'll get a move on that php upgrade, since I told them that was the breakpoint.
Anyway, I'm not advertising anything; just contributing to the group awareness of good/bad/mediocre hosts. I do have an affiliate link for usmanbiz, but until I know if they're really going to perform or just play yo-yo, I can't in good conscience recommend them. I'll let y'all know if that changes.
Andria
so much for usmanbiz
Well. usmanbiz is history. After about a week of solid performance, yesterday they went down about 9:15am, and were still down at 6pm last night. I had emailed them around 9:30am to inquire, and still hadn't heard anything at noon, so I emailed again. At 1pm I still hadn't heard anything, so I decided to go ahead and sign up with that alternate host I mentioned, Hobersoft -- who have a pro-rate/rebate policy on downtime. So I signed up. Around 2pm usmanbiz's admin finally deigned to answer my email and asked me to check it again, which was useless, and I had pretty much given up on them anyhow, considering I had already signed up with another host. As I said, they were still down as late as 6-7pm last night, though when I needed to check on something about 11pm I found that they had returned to service -- too late by far.
So even if you think usmanbiz looks sweet with their much-advertised speed, I'd advise giving them a miss; that kind of downtime won't work for a commercial site at all, and would be pretty danged irritating even for a hobby site. If they ever figure out how to keep their servers online for more than a few days at a time, they might actually be a viable host.
From what I've seen so far, Hobersoft isn't quite as fast, but they do appear to be solid, and they are faster than Servage -- which, granted, isn't that much of a stretch -- although even with Servage's slow speed, they *are* very stable, so if stability counts for someone more than speed does, then I'd still recommend Servage. And I suppose that if you're in Europe, Servage might not even be all that slow. Hobersoft won me over because although they're an Irish company, they have servers all over, even in North America, even here in Georgia -- probably Atlanta, being such a communications hub and all. Hobersoft also won me over because of their follow-up emails; they seemed to actually want my business, as opposed to just blowing me off. So far, their response time to 2 diff support tickets on rather insignificant issues was very good; I hope that remains true if I ever need their support on more critical matters.
Andria
Andria, I've been using
Andria,
I've been using Drupal on both Hostmonster and Bluehost now for over a year and have had no problems.
They're uptime is very good and support is excellent.
Both are in the same facility and owned by the same company. However, there are some differences in what they offer. Hostmonster is a little cheaper.
I'm sure that you could find some opposing opinions, however, what I can say from my point of view is that both of the work fine for a Drupal site - at least for me.
Techgy
Bluehost has been good for me
I've been using bluehost for a couple months now, and I must say that I've had no problems. I've added domains and subdomains without problems. The cPanel interface has made setting up my Drupal site really easy. I did pay for the two years up-front, and right now I have pretty low traffic sites.
I would recommend them.
Check out my blog! blog.cubicledropout.com
or my Drupal test site at drupal.cubicledropout.com
bluehost...
I've had nothing but good luck with them (so far)
-=- christopher
bluehost, looking for recs also
That's disturbing about limiting 25 concurrent connections and yet another feature not being advertised
I'm now looking around for a new web host. I've had bluehost for a long time but the server I am had a DDoS attack and what they did was ban the victim of the attack and to make matters worse, the site has been crashed and limited now for five days
I also was hung up on by some support person when in all seriousness I did not raise my voice, nothing, and when I complained to a supervisor well, the attitude was blame the customer and he clearly wasn't going to do a damn thing about someone working customer support by hanging up on them.
So, the site is still semi-crashed, now 5 days, they refuse to move the account to a different server in spite of this and now this mention of a limit on 25 concurrent connections to the drupal site.
I also had to tweak my php.ini with Drupal and also optimized it btw, overall the performance has been fine on bluehost. It's actually other accounts that crash the cpu, because it's shared and they don't know how to optimize their scripts or limit their cron job calls and so on, or my favorite is they write scripts with errors. On the other hand it seems bluehost doesn't have any automatic scripts plain killing processes when the load gets to high (that I can see), they simply warn the site owner and after 3 warnings....you guessed it, they are banned
They also limit their email to 50 per hour max outgoing and when one is running community sites, the limitations get fairly obvious.
Even if someone is running a business, 25 concurrent connections seems like someone isn't doing too well at that business frankly.
If they make good great but to me right now they seem to care less about the customers or the fact they have been there so long. It's like suck it up or you are banned is the new customer motto.
5+ years and 6 to 10 sites = Very Few Problems
Some of the restrictions and issues I have read about concerning Bluehost are only true to a limited extent. I've been with Bluehost since the early days and have been fairly impressed. I have never waited more than 3 to 5 minutes for a support call. And once on the phone with tech support they have worked until my issue was resolved.
As to 25 concurrent connections, that only applies to shared ip's. The limit is lifted if one pays the $30 per year for a dedicated ip. The dedicated ip is for all your domains and subdomains under one account. That's a pretty good deal in my case since it means that I get dedicated ips for my accounts and it averages out to about $3.00 per year additional for each.
I run 3 mailing lists (Dada mail) and yes the limit is 50 emails per hour, unless you call tech support and ask them to raise your limit to 500 emails per hour. They will increase your limit to 500 emails for every domain and sub-domain, all it takes is a request.
As to the crashing and banning; my experience has been that if I had a script problem or a hackers code get on one of my sites, yes Bluehost would shut it down. But they emailed me and let me know that it was an issue and then went through the scripts with me to find the offensive code. Then they turned my site back on -- issue resolved.
I am personally on an old box with Bluehost (by that I mean an early number ie. Bluehost uses box 1 through 100 for example). The box I am on is heavily loaded with other business accounts and has never crashed and overall has been up 99+% of the time. I am now running my first Drupal site, but I am also running sites in Mambo, Joomla, and Etomite along with the mailing list mentioned above.
I am sure some folks have legitimate complaints. I just felt like some of these issues needed to be responded to.
KenFar
http://crew707.org
"I probably will always be just a novice"
more on bluehost
Crashing and banning. This is new because they have grown too fast and they cannot manage the "bad" accounts so they are just getting rid of them. Obviously that's going to get "rid" of some innocent DDoS victims.
On the server, there is a limit on concurrent connections, but per server. I just asked and I don't have an answer on 25 shared versus unlimited dedicated but the server itself has a limit. I was told there is no a 25 limit on shared, which is good.
On email, DADA mail is web based, it's not a true client discussion list. On mailman only 100 subscribers per list and that's obviously an issue if one has large subscribers. there are other packages who allow you to schedule your announcement type email delivery, to get around the 500 limits on bluehost but overall, running large community sites, discussion lists, this is a down side. On the other hand, my attitude towards mailing lists that are that large and discussion is use a damn forum, but private lists that gets a little more complicated.
On support, most are fantastic, I mean truly, but there are a few bad apples on the phone (maybe even just 1) and then there are "bad" servers as well, due to "bad accounts" most often. I think this explains why some swear by them and others are swearing at them. But I gotta tell ya that bad apple who thinks hanging up on people claiming they are rude after uttering two sentences is ....well, I swear it's the same guy from 3 years ago who did that and well, he should not be in customer service with such an attitude. I seriously wonder just how many posts on the Internet are attributable to just that one guy.
On Drupal, you have to tweak your php.ini, increase memory, and I did enable FASTCGI and that speed up the site considerably.
I have max. execution time 30, mem 32MB.
I also put all caching on and on 3rd party modules, some of them are better designed than others and I had to get rid of a couple making a large number of mySQL queries and also modify some of the modules in the code. (Drupal 5.7).
I would strongly recommend watching your CPU load when first using Drupal because mine did exceed CPU limits due to global variables not disabled in php.ini, so you cannot just install it and think it's all good.
All of this said, they have to do more on DDoS, they are really getting attacked here and they cannot let customers just "hang" when there is a major problem. This was the worse I have ever seen bluehost, we're talking 5 days of a downed site and that's just unacceptable, but it is also the first time it was that bad and I've been there forever also. Believe me I'm pretty bummed out reporting all of this, bluehost hires Americans, doesn't outsource and for me, that's a really big deal (in addition to features).
About 3 years ago I was on just a plain bad server, finally got a server migration and most of the old site problems disappeared, so obviously there are bad servers, bad "server neighbors" and if you're in that situation, you're going to have a very bad experience.
on DDoS, I'm going to limit through .htaccess regional IP addresses simply because I have sites that don't need global access, but I think bluehost needs more attention to stopping DDoS from a customer viewpoint.
Another issue is spam bots, which from the hits alone I wonder about. They seem to search on keywords on where to hit I noticed and then are intense. I don't think it's the PHP file name, but keywords are one of the main causes....so if you make the ill fated mistake of putting say job and b*ow (no point in bringing them here!) in the same post, watch out. I have CAPTCHA, Akismet and so on but now I'm going to plain deny based on global regions.
So, I'll leave it agnostic for now but 5 days of dead sites has shaken me. I literally was about to move the sites today over it. I literally have bluehost ads up, in the affiliate program and recommend them to others so these latest adventures truly are a bummer to me.
On my community blog, the reads and visits dropped to nothing during this as well.
Clarification on Dada Mail
You may want to check out Dada Mail before you say it's not a true discussion list and web based. It runs just like Mailman but in a much nicer format if configured to be a "discussion List" I set up one email that all subscribers can send an email addressed to and when recieved by my mail server, that email is then sent out to the discussion list. When set up as a "discussion List" it sends and recieves directly into ones preferred email client. One does not have to use the web interface at all. It is by no means an "Announcement Only" list. That was it's intent originally, but it has grown to much more. It sets up fine over SMTP and SASL, the security and double opt in prevent most all spam. The big difference in it's discussion setup verses Mailman and others is that it cleanly formats in HTML or Plain text (user preference) and attachments such as pdf, jpegs, etc.... are not stripped and sent as a second seperate file, but are included in a nice email format.
Regards,
KenFar
http://crew707.org
"I probably will always be just a novice"
BlueHost.com are liars !!!
BlueHost.com are liars !!! Say it offers unlimited space and unlimited bandwith, but the limitation is made to MySql server! If you host more than 2 or 3 sites and you have some website visitors, to have an inconvenience to show the following message: “CPU Excedeed error!” and your websites wil be down ! Do not trust in them. If you need hosting for a small site, it is preferable to use a free hosting service, and no longer give money to BlueHost. If you want a professional hosting service looking for another hosting service, but do not use BlueHost. There are charlatans and liars.
terms page
did you read their terms page? It should say there what their limits are. And most shared hosts have limits, even on unlimited.
~silverwing
If your website doesn't
If your website doesn't occupy a lot of resources, then blue host is a not bad choice when compared to others.
Here is bluehost coupon in case someone need it.
BlueHost.com is a bullshit webhosting !
BlueHost.com is a bullshit webhosting ! Just take a look here:
http://i41.tinypic.com/72dh91.jpg
[IMG]http://i41.tinypic.com/72dh91.jpg[/IMG]
Bluehost has much more
Bluehost has much more restricted resource usage policy than the other hosting company. And due to its over selling situation, Bluehost is only the right choice for low traffic web site, and it's also a good choice for a new site or a beginner as it won't cause you a lot.
If your traffic go high, you should run away from Bluehost. That's not for you.
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