On Apr 25, 2008, at 11:58 AM, Steven Alligood wrote: <snip>
Bluehost has a large number of customers that are getting exactly what is advertised. Customers are never let go for using bandwidth or drive space, although sometimes they have to be moved to other servers to accommodate them. What customers are let go for is causing problems for other customers, which often results from CPU pounding or constant heavy drive I/O, and mirroring large active repos does both of those.
As an owner/admin of a hosting company since 1999, I thought I would chime in. I have watched the hosting space change and evolve over the last few years, and I have noticed an interesting trend. Many hosting providers are doing just what Chab said. They are over-promising. I have a BlueHost account that was acquired as part of a business transaction, and I have been less than impressed with them. Their customer service is poor, I have to give them a copy of my drivers license to get SSH access, and while their offerings are broad, they are nevertheless part of a canned package, and they are things that BlueHost has chosen to run and/or install, not necessarily what a client wants to run and/or install. We have always tried to under- promise and over-deliver. We don't oversell, but make sure that what we have promised lines up with our capacity. Of course, the result of this is we have not become fabulously wealthy, but that's ok. :)
That being said, I also understand the predicament that BlueHost (and other mass-volume hosting providers) are in. You cannot be a mass- volume shared web hosting company without the types of things they are doing. Letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry have access to a shared machine that other customers are depending on greatly increases the risk that someone with malicious intent will get access and wreak havoc. Mass-volume shared hosting is all about automation, from installs, provisioning, backups, you name it, and it is either automated, or it should be. Allowing non-conforming setups can totally screw that up.
With regards to this specific instance, BlueHost has covered themselves by making their terms of service EXTREMELY broad. Basically, they reserve the right to shut your site down for any reason whatsoever, even it totally screws you over. If you decided to run a popular news site like Slashdot or OSNews on BlueHost, it would do the EXACT same things that mirroring a popular linux distro would, or worse. It would slam the CPU, network, and most assuredly would affect the other people hosting on the same machine. These types of things could happen with any webhost, of course, but if you are hosting with people you know, they will usually talk things over with you before making a uni-lateral decision.
If you are looking for cheap, and that is the most important thing to you, then go for BlueHost, or some place that offers you a VPS for $8 a month (which, btw, is too good to be true). Cheap != Good, and if your livelihood depends on who you host with or get a VPS with, then you would be well-advised to go with someone you trust, even if they may cost more. If it is just for play and getting shut down is not an inconvenience, then it doesn't really matter who you host with. I like the line from Lewis Carroll: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."
Just my $0.02. Grant /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
