Those of you who use BlueHost...

[limeandpepper]

Has it been pretty much smooth-sailing all the way? I'm thinking about using them as a host and would love some personal reviews from MMM members. I recently tried another host which had great reviews online and it really isn't working out for me, which is why I'm asking here instead of continuing to check out reviews elsewhere - I've already read plenty.

Also, do any of you purchase these potential inclusions?

Domain Privacy Protection - $0.83 per month (Billed annually at $9.99/yr)
Site Backup Pro - $1.67 per month (Billed to end of hosting term)
SiteLock Domain Security - $1.67 per month (Billed annually at $19.99/yr)

And does anyone have a problem with huge amounts of spam comments? With the website I set up, I did so several months ago, and then admittedly neglected it as I was travelling around Asia. When I came back from my trip, I found that I had 1000+ comments on a public test post that I did. I had not shared the address with anyone, they were all spam-bots. I've never had a problem of this scale with Blogger, some spammers might slip through the net but it's generally been good.

Additional information. I plan for the blog/website to be heavy on photos, not sure if that would cause a bandwidth issues. I know BlueHost says it's "unlimited" but apparently no hosting provider can really promise that. The major issue I am having with the current hosting provider is that even though I've only uploaded one test post with a few photos, there have been thousands of visitors looking at it and apparently I need to upgrade to more bandwidth if this continues. Yet I hadn't shared my website address with anyone, and all these visitors are actually spam bots. Will this problem be eliminated if I use BlueHost?

[EricMA]

I use them for a few personal sites and a number of sites for my clients.

Overall, I've had a good experience. I find the servers to be a bit slow at times, and their support can be quick to try to pass the buck. It's easier to remember some of the negatives, but I've used them for years and really do recommend them.

I use the domain privacy service, and would no matter the host. They will use THEIR contact information on the domain registration (a very public record) instead of yours. Worried about spam and physical junk mail? Don't give your personal contact info to people who want your domain name and think they can harass you into selling it to them.

As for SiteLock and Backup pro.... I take responsibility for the content on my websites. I won't pay someone else to do this for me. That said, when things do go wrong, it's on me to know that I've made a backup. If I didn't, I get burned.

As for spam posts... The host is only there to give you a publicly available computer. The software/websites that are running on it are your responsibility. Something like wordpress has the potential to be spammed. There are plugins you can install to make it harder for others to do that, but those are your responsibility to install and manage.

You can't really control who visits your website. People can search for content on web-available machines. Bluehost, nor anyone else will fix that unless you require users to authenticate before they see anything. If you allow un-authenticated users to post content to your databases, then spam-bots are really no different from any other user.

As for bandwidth... there is a difference between bandwidth and speed. They will not restrict the amount of data your site is allowed to server, but don't expect it to serve data as fast as google or amazon. 

Hope this helps.

[limeandpepper]

Thanks EricMA, it does help! Having already used Blogger for years, I've rarely had to worry about spam, and images have always loaded pretty fast. I am lured by the potential of Wordpress but it does concern me that I'm not tech-savvy enough to handle it.

[ShortInSeattle]

Bluehost is inexpensive, and you generally get what you pay for. That being said they've been fine for the basic sites I run.

Support is unimpressive. I've had a few site outages, which have been short lived. Whenever I've emailed support, the site is back up by the time they reply, and the reply is basically "the site is working, make sure your browser is connected to the internet."

You can always change hosts if you need more power later on. I don't use the extra services.

[limeandpepper]

Thanks ShortInSeattle! I am aiming for a fairly simple site, but given that I also plan on posting photos that will add up to a significant number over time, I'm not sure if Bluehost would be happy with that. I guess I can try them for 1 year and see how that goes.

[Daley]

There's cheaper Cpanel based hosts out there than Bluehost that provide far better hosting, customer and technical support, and they do so by not overpromising with some absurd promise like "unlimited" anything. Every client I've ever dealt with who's used Bluehost I've found myself recommending they move away from them due to SQL server problems and general issues... they're officially 0-5 in my book now. (Here's a more technical detailing of the problems with Bluehost.)

Look into A Small Orange instead, and if you're using Wordpress, simply offload your photos to Picasa or Flickr and use a plugin such as Photonic Gallery. Also take advantage of Cloudflare to offload bandwidth further, fortunately if you use ASO's DNS servers, it's easy to turn on Cloudflare support from within Cpanel.

As for reducing spambots and comments, making the site more secure, and easing restoration in case it gets compromised (and Wordpress can and will get compromised given enough time - but that can be said of any scripted CMS)... what I currently recommend is the following set of plugins:

Anti-spam
AVH First Defense Against Spam Plugin
Bad Behavior
CloudFlare
Google Authenticator
iThemes Security
Online Backup for Wordpress

None of the humans who post to my hole in the wall have a problem doing so, but I haven't seen so much as a spam comment in over a year, and according to logs, bot traffic only accounts for about 10-20% of overall traffic. Of course, I tweaked .htaccess and robots.txt a bit as well on top of all this, but I don't mind sharing what I did if asked.

[limeandpepper]

Thanks I.P. Daley! I know someone who uses A Small Orange. I remembered looking into it but wasn't sure if the storage and bandwidth would be enough for me. I might e-mail the company and see what they recommend.

I did turn on Cloudflare before going on holiday. I'm also definitely going to put all photos in something like Picasa or Flickr if I decide to stick with Wordpress.org.

Thank you for all the plugin suggestions!

In case there are any further insights, this is the message I got from my host which prompted me to think about switching providers:

"We would like to inform you that your account has used 90% the monthly allowed usage of 300000 CPU seconds per account. Please note that once you hit 100% of the allowed monthly CPU seconds, your web service will be limited for the calendar month. The web service limit means you might be having problems accessing your website."

I sent a support ticket to seek clarification (I had no idea what CPU seconds are) and the explanation was:

"It appears that there was no excessive traffic towards your website. It appears that your website is generating a steady rate of visitors' access as you can see from the above tool.

It has reached 90% of the allowed monthly account executions for your current shared hosting plan. I believe that the remaining part should be enough for the rest of the month, however I have added another 100 000 CPU seconds as an exception.

However if this repeats next month I would recommend that you consider an upgrade to one of our higher hosting solutions"

Even though I hadn't shared the address with anyone (I was still fiddling and had only made a test post with a few photos) so all the traffic was from bots, and yet seemingly that is enough to require an upgrade to a higher hosting solution, which seems unreasonable, hence why I'm thinking about switching.

[Rangifer]

I have used bluehost in the past. Their CPU limits are way too conservative, likely due to overselling their servers. Customer support was also unacceptably slow and not very competent. I believe they were bought out a while back by one of the major web hosting companies and essentially turned into a 'lets make as much cash as possible' type of operation.

I currently use www.stablehost.com, and true to the name they deliver. My site consistently has 99.9X% uptime each month. Their price is competitive with other services and the service excellent. I'd recommend taking a look.

Edit: I read I.P. Daley's blog post, and will add that I don't recommend DreamHost either. They let a site of mine be down for days after a support ticket was submitted. When I complained their response was that if I didn't like it I could take my business elsewhere. They also reminded me that the year of service I had prepaid was also non-refundable. I left them ASAP, went to WiredTree (which was awesome), but decided it was overkill and then ended up at StableHost.

[Daley]

I read I.P. Daley's blog post, and will add that I don't recommend DreamHost either.

Well, I should post an addendum to that, honestly. I don't recommend Dreamhost either, and though Dreamhost had delivered reasonably well at the time (and lightyears better than Bluehost - we only tried them for the free NPO hosting), the needs of the site from that post eventually started to outgrow them as well on the SQL end, plus I found their PHP stack a little... quirky. They too are now on ASO (and have been for a year at this point), specifically one of their VPS packages. That said, they still use Dreamhost for a static content server. That is one good thing I can say about Dreamhost - no matter how quirky their PHP setup, no matter how gutless their SQL servers, we never had data loss and they never throttled bandwidth.

[limeandpepper]

Ooh I will look into Stable Host as well, I don't think I've looked at them before. Thanks Rangifier!

[gimp]

Shrug. Been using them for 5 years at least, and never any issues. Daley and I have had discussions on this :) Your mileage will vary.

I use them for four domains... or is it five now? And a couple that aren't mine.

[limeandpepper]

I use them for four domains... or is it five now? And a couple that aren't mine.

Thanks for your other point of view! If I recall correctly you're quite into photography... do any of your domains showcase quite a bit of photography and if so, do you host the photos somewhere else?