Bluehost NOT Recommended

Negotiations is a fine art.

I don't disagree with Matt's harsh response based on the snippet of email you posted above. Something tells me that what you've posted here isn't the whole story as it certainly isn't the entire email exchange.

When you are on a shared host you agree to their RUP and TOS and it is their duty to their other customers (regardless of length of business) to enfore their policies.

For others who find themselves in this type of position if you take an aggressive stance with a business owner, be prepared to have an aggressive defensive stance in response. Especially when we are talking value hosting. It's not like purchasing a big ticket item here. When you fire the first shot with your own statements (especially to an owner), be prepared to have shots fired back. Misquoting, Misstating, misrepresenting and exaggerationyourself or how long you've been doing business with someone isn't ever very bright either.

That aside, drupal.org is not intended to be a vehicle for your gripes against any host. If you want more control over a server, get a VPS or a dedicated box. If you want total control set up a server in your home.

I am currently using bluehost as well. Upon sign-up was given 600 GB of space and now reduced to 150 GB. They promised that if I'll need more space I'll be given it. Also, blue host DOES NOT support :cathcall: email, means any misrouted or mistyped email will not be delivered. Bad. I have had better experience in past with other host companies.

I have to agree with Matt to a certain extent. I have run a couple of web hosting companies that offered unlimited space and we have had customers use a large amount if disk space, up to 250GB or more in some cases. However, we didn't shut them off. It was always the users that use a lot more CPU or memory, causing issues on the server.

This is a draw back of the standard shared server setup, which Bluehost, Hostgator, and other cPanel hosts use. Find a scalable web host that doesn't use a single server set up and you'll find that your service will be much improved.

So while you may not recommend Bluehost, it appears that you were never on the right platform to begin with.

Clustered Drupal Hosting powered by Uptimehost's Cloud.

I have 6 sites on Bluehost right now, 4 of them are Drupal site, 1 Joomla site, and 1 wordpress. So far, I am very satisfied with their service . And their MySQL speeds is extremely fast, according to the blog of Matt, I believe they have spent huge time on improving the performance. For my experience, Bluehost or Hostmonster are the good company to work with.

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they will kill your account - even a blog site - if someone comments on it and uses "profanity." the company is controlled by hard-line right wing folks that feel they are doing the world a favor by censoring out sites that should be protected in the public domain under the U.S. 1st amendment. Their terms of service are notoriously difficult to find, and legally, they are utterly vague. It's a loophole they've created for themselves to censor and/or limit support requirements when their /horrible/ servers corrupt databases or grossly under-perform reasonable expectations by a customer. Do a simple search online about these types of complaints with BlueHost. They are not isolated - they are quite a tradition over at BlueHost and have been my own personal negative experiences with them, as well, and I will never use them again, personally, nor would I refer even my worst enemy to them because of their lack of professionalism, quality service, and certainly not least of all, their censorship policies.

-=- christopher

I have been attempting to get a large Drupal site up and running on BlueHost and I've been hitting a memory limit issue. After spending a few days trying to figure out why a 128M memory limit was bombing out at ~50M I got my answer. This is copied from another thread where I was trying to get help:

well, after *several* rounds of communication with Bluehost, one of which I was told to "find another web host" even though I am still in the staging phase of the site and have no users, the truth finally came out. A level 1 technician sent me this explanation:

Dear client,

Our system have all kinds of internal limit that are use as a maintenance tool to help avoid server lockups by preventing customers from running inefficient scripts that monopolize unnecessary CPU time and slow your server down. Our internal memory limit is right around 50MB and our admin won't raise the limit at this time. We basically not allowing our client to run any script that requires more memory on our server.

So, they say that they allow a PHP Memory_Limit of 128M, but that's simply not true.

Is anyone running a large Drupal site on a shared hosting environment that will allow a true 128M limit? We are investigating our options for dedicated servers, but that's a little way off into the future.

-
jgaryt

Hi, I run the Blue Host ads on Drupal.org hosting forums. We take this kind of feedback very seriously. I've tried to help people with problems with hosting companies in the past. If we find that you've been rude or aggressively with a customer support person then there's not much we can do. We understand that hosting is a highly competitive and commodity business and that leads to customer service issues.

Prior to running ads for Blue Host we did a background check to see if there had been any complaints through the better business bureau. There were none, and that is why we felt comfortable run their ads.

Kieran
Director of fundraising
Drupal association

I have been hosting Drupal based sites on Bluehost from 2003. Yes, there were some issues that were resolved in due course and I could unreservedly recommend Bluehost for hosting a Drupal based website.

But no longer....

A week ago I was issued with a warning that my account contained 220,000 individual files and unless I reduced them to under 50,000 files in accordance with the Terms Of Service (TOS), my account will be deactivated automatically. Yes, I was careless with the amount of obsolete Drupal installations lying around, having each Drupal site with it's own code base, not deleting temp files or cleaning out mail folders etc.

This is the big issue: 50,000 files are NOT extreme for a Drupal based site. Consider Boerboel.co.za. As a community site it has 9200 user contributed and 4000 other images of dogs. Every image additionally has a thumbnail, large and small versions. The opt-in newsletter using DADA-Mail easily adds another 1000 files,. The Drupal code base is easily close to 900 files and close to 2,000 files including added modules. Additionally, if you have two blogs, and three sub-sites each with its own code base you are talking about > 10,000 files. Add mail (every incoming email is saved as a file), temp files etc and boerboel.co.za is well over 50,000 files. The point is that a Drupal-based website can potentially grow to the point of exceeding the maximum allowed number of files and it need not take many years to do so.

This is not a gripe about Bluehost, but it is an issue that puts an additional burden on Drupal implementors. The total file count of a hosting account is a potential issue that Drupal developers and implementors should be aware of.

The file count issue with regards to shared hosting is this: An excessive number of files takes an extraordinary amount of time to be checked for file system integrity in a Linux environment. This has a negative impact on the entire performance of the shared server. It is therefore a distinct possibility that many other providers of shared hosting options already (or will in future) implement a restriction on the maximum file count.

These issues become important in implementing Drupal in shared hosting environments:

• Using a shared code base for all domains hosted under a single account.
• Restricting user uploads and images originating from users.
• Regular housekeeping and cleaning up temp files and obsolete files.
• Regularly monitoring your total file count for your account.

Investigating the following options:

• Storing images and external files as BLOB's in databases.
• Saving additional files, uploads and media on external services such as Amazon's S3 or other cloud based computing services.
• Using external image storage websites such as Flickr or Google's Picasa web album for off-site storage.

I was having 500.000 fioles, about 50 domains on bluehost, and after some kicked out of sites for too many visits (around 1000 unique visitors per day) the yasked me to pass from 500.000 files to 50.000 because I was slowing down server or they delete my account in 15 days, and thsi was defined fromthem automatic super complex and intelligent automatic system for performance.

I too was victim of bluehost.com's advertisement. Amazing how a company can bend the term "unlimited" to their discretion. No reference to limitations in their ads and info pages, only some arbitrary and vague "re-definition" of the word "unlimited" deep inside their Terms of Service. See their §7.02 'What "Unlimited" means' - already an oxymoron to me.

bluehost.com created a emergency situation when out of the blue (pun intended) suspending my account without notice, putting a delivery deadline in danger. I was not given a chance to clean out files to comply with their suddenly enforced random policy. I'm running 10+ domains with them, but this loyalty left the customer service unimpressed. Needless to say they lost a client.

Unfortunately, bluehost.com is not the only company hiding their real policies behind fine print while misleading potential customers on their front pages and ads. Be prepared that "unlimited" usually means "VERY LIMITED space, files, transfers & CPU" for many host companies.

I am now running my own Mac Mini Server over my FiOS connection. Happily and unlimited.

Klaus Badelt