Any experience with Bluehost?

[joviyach]

I am looking for hosting for RoR, but I'd also like to be able to do
some PHP with MySQL on the same account as well. I have been looking
at Bluehost. Does anyone have anything comments good or bad about
them?

Thanks,

Jim

 

[Chad Perrin]

I am looking for hosting for RoR, but I'd also like to be able to do
some PHP with MySQL on the same account as well. I have been looking
at Bluehost. Does anyone have anything comments good or bad about
them?

I've had nothing but good experiences with Bluehost so far. I hear
rumors they throttle mail handling, though, so if you're planning to run
a high-traffic mailing list you may want to see if there's anything to
that before signing up.

. . and if you decide to go with a different webhost, make sure you
check to see if it allows SFTP access before paying any money. You don't
want to get stuck with a webhost that doesn't provide encrypted file
transfer capability.

 

[Brett Simmers]

I am looking for hosting for RoR, but I'd also like to be able to do
some PHP with MySQL on the same account as well. I have been looking
at Bluehost. Does anyone have anything comments good or bad about
them?

Thanks,

Jim

I had Bluehost for a while and they aren't great for Rails sites. They
were fine for my low traffic personal site, but I was also in charge of
a fairly high-traffic Rails site that didn't do so well. There would be
random fcgi failures, and their CPU time limits are pretty restrictive.
We switched the site to Mongrel on hostingrails.com and it's been much
better. I don't think there's anything Bluehost had that hostingrails
doesn't, and hostingrails also has subversion support. Hostingrails is
a little more expensive but I think it's worth it for serious Rails
development. (Yes, it has PHP and MySQL, too)

-Brett

 

[Chad Perrin]

I had Bluehost for a while and they aren't great for Rails sites. They
were fine for my low traffic personal site, but I was also in charge of
a fairly high-traffic Rails site that didn't do so well. There would be
random fcgi failures, and their CPU time limits are pretty restrictive.
We switched the site to Mongrel on hostingrails.com and it's been much
better. I don't think there's anything Bluehost had that hostingrails
doesn't, and hostingrails also has subversion support. Hostingrails is
a little more expensive but I think it's worth it for serious Rails
development. (Yes, it has PHP and MySQL, too)

Hmm -- hostingrails.com looks pretty good. I'm going to have to check it
out in a bit more depth.

 

[joviyach]

I had Bluehost for a while and they aren't great for Rails sites. They
were fine for my low traffic personal site, but I was also in charge of
a fairly high-traffic Rails site that didn't do so well. There would be
random fcgi failures, and their CPU time limits are pretty restrictive.
We switched the site to Mongrel on hostingrails.com and it's been much
better. I don't think there's anything Bluehost had that hostingrails
doesn't, and hostingrails also has subversion support. Hostingrails is
a little more expensive but I think it's worth it for serious Rails
development. (Yes, it has PHP and MySQL, too)

-Brett

Thanks! I will definitely check that out. I am just getting started
with Ruby, but I am looking for scalability. I have been coding in PHP
for a few years now, and it definitely pays to choose the right
hosting the first time around, I have been burned in the past by not
doing my research on this.

 

[Max Williams]

I'm disappointed with bluehost because
a) they don't support subversion (don't know why!).
b) they don't allow ffmpeg or mencoder to be used, because of the cpu
hit. This means my site, which allows video uploading and conversion,
is badly broken on bluehost.

I did my RoR app for my degree project, and it all works apart from
video upload, so i'm leaving it up there until my tutor's finished
looking at it. But after that i'm going to swap to somewhere that
allows subversion and ffmpeg. Any recommendations for these things?

 

[Max Williams]

I highly recommend a dedicated server at http://blueboxgrid.com/,
their service has been amazing.

~Wayne

s///g
Wayne E. Seguin
Sr. Systems Architect & Systems Administrator

Thanks for the recommendation Wayne, but i'm a poor student and can't
afford $250 a month.

Does anyone know any cheap servers that will allow subversion and most
importantly ffmpeg?

 

[Max Williams]

Amazon EC2 & build your own?

~Wayne

s///g
Wayne E. Seguin
Sr. Systems Architect & Systems Administrator

hmm, looks interesting. My app is in the amateur rather than pro league
- it's for a degree project, though i'm going to carry on with it
afterwards. Would you say that EC2 is suitable for a student project?
I had a look at their pricing structure but didn't go as far as working
out what my actual costs would work out as.

 

[Max Williams]

Sorry, I have not used EC2 personally so I cannot answer this one.
That said, I don't see why it wouldn't be?

~Wayne

s///g
Wayne E. Seguin
Sr. Systems Architect & Systems Administrator

I guess what i meant was "would it be suitable for a student, who can't
afford to pay much" . Has anyone else used this? What are your
typical charges?

 

[Alex Young]

Amazon EC2 & build your own?

If EC2's an option, then any old virtual machine would probably do the
trick - depending on how heavily you're going to hit the CPU, of course.
I'd suggest getting a VM for a month from (someone like)
http://www.bytemark.co.uk and see how you get on.