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Hosting my wpmu site on Bluehost is it safe??? (51 posts)

  1. m1gu3
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    I'm finally launching my wpmu site,I plan to buy one of the Bluehost and later scale to a different and bigger server if possible and my question is, Is it safe for me to install on Bluehost all thou they say the hosting plan I'm buying has ulimited disk space and bandwith? sincerely seems a little to good for me there has to be a drawback somewhere.

    Also can you provide me with live examples of sites and servers? such as "my site is in this server" kind of. Thanks in advance for all your help.

  2. tdjcbe
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Best bet would be to 1) Search the forums as Bluehost has been discussed as some length in the past and 2) Contact Bluehost directly, explain your plans with specifics, and ask them how they feel about it.

  3. boonika
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    A lot of people recommend Slicehost. Read this interesting thread: http://wpmu.org/big-smart/

    I myself am using (mt) gridserver but I wouldn't recommend it for WPMU to others.

  4. wehican
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Hostmonster and Bluehost are the same from what I understand. Hostmonster doesn't do wildcard subdomains, but WPMU works just fine on it. Have had no issues with installation as others I have seen on here. Keep it simple and without all the whistles and bells and bleeding edge stuff that hog resources and there should be no problems. It is cheap enough to practice on, anyhow.

    http://perspectives.ourlittleuniverse.org/

  5. VentureMaker
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    > the hosting plan I'm buying has ulimited disk space and bandwith? > sincerely seems a little to good for me there has to be a drawback > somewhere.

    Welcome to overselling ;)

    If you dream about safe hosting you should get at least VPS. Or dedicated server.

    As for shared hosters - check DreamHost and APTHost

  6. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 15 years ago #

    "(mt) gridserver but I wouldn't recommend it for WPMU to others"

    Me either.

  7. Trent
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    I thought (gs) from MT would be fine, but adding any additional functionality that eats up CPU time was a killer on that one so I migrated to their (dv) service. No matter how you look at it, a virtual private server is the minimum unless you are only talking about a couple of users with a minimum of blogs.

    Trent

  8. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Yep.

    I'm gonna recommend that to this particular person.

  9. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Slicehost here and haven't looked back since.

    I've had MU running on both Bluehost (a very basic play install, you have to ask support about a wildcard dns entry and they will insist on you also paying for a dedicated IP address as well) and MediaTemple GS (actually is quite easy to setup, BUT they keep a tight leash on your use of GPU's - a grid processing unit and database usage) before.

    I would not recommend either of the latter two unless you want the hassle of moving your site a couple months down the line.

  10. boonika
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    There you go. I even remember that cafespain has mentioned this on his blog few months ago, moving from (mt) GS to SliceHost... back than while I was still waiting for news on StayPress:D Btw cafespain, what 'slicehost plan' did you purchase? And what about Linux Distribution?

  11. d_kc
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Hostgator is great.
    They are pricey tho. I got a dedicated from them. I payed and was configuring my server 30 minutes later. Musta been a slow day for them.

    Told them I'm putting MU and they installed eAccelerator for me.

  12. wehican
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Hostmonster charges $3 a month for a dedicated IP. Don't need one for WPMU there. Have to check if they will put in an accelerator.

  13. tdjcbe
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    In some case you may want to consider that dedicated IP address. Especially if you are on shared hosting. That way you don't have to worry about other accounts sitting on the same box you;re on and having your email get caught. Easier to whitelist if you have clients who email whitelist by IP address.

    Ditto on SEO concerns, rss services and the like.

    For a standard MU install, I wouldn't worry about it though.

  14. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    @wehican: Bluehost said that I wouldn't need a dedicated IP until they tried to setup the wildcard dns and entries in apache and then came back and said that they couldn't do it after all without one - I think it was only about $30 for 12 months.

    @boonika: I'm testing at the moment, so I have a few 256mb slices :) I've got one for the database server and one for the webserver the handy thing is that you can increase the memory as soon as you need to, so I'm just judging load and seeing how things pan out. So far it's holding up fantastically. I have Ubuntu on both and am running the Litespeed webserver with eaccelerator, PHP5 and the latest stable MySQL.

  15. boonika
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    @cafespain

    thanks

  16. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    "Bluehost said that I wouldn't need a dedicated IP until they tried to setup the wildcard dns and entries in apache and then came back and said that they couldn't do it after all without one - I think it was only about $30 for 12 months."

    That tells me to run, as they're just nickel and diming the user, and trying to throw up a small roadblock.

    You can run lots of MU's, with wildcard subdomains, off of a shared IP like that.

  17. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    @lunabyte: Agree totally, though what finally put me off them (besides a 36 hour outage that taught me wonderful lessons about redundancy - in the single point of failure way of thinking) was this:

    http://mattheaton.com/

    Blimey that guy is an absolute ******* conceited, full of himself, ****!. But that's just my opinion, I shall go to my corner now.

  18. wehican
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    @cafespain I have run into that needing a dedicated IP on a Windows hosting service for wildcard DNS. I don't understand why subdomain installs are considered so important. What is the difference between a username in the beginning or the end? The domain name really dictates what looks best. I can have 999 subdomains on my Hostmonster account and 100 MYSQL databases, plus another 100 postgres databases. No limit on the database size except for the unlimited disk space. That is a lot of WP standalone installs if you want subdomain blogs, plus they can maintain it themselves. That is roughly $130 a year, including domain name and dedicated IP.

    I haven't had much problem with them. Quick responses, even on the phone. They did slow things up for a short while recently adding new equipment for the unlimited disk space. Their software is pretty recent.

    They may not be the best place if you want to play with the bleeding edge, but they work quite well with stable stuff. Stable and well designed stuff shouldn't hog resources that get you in trouble with them, either. They don't make money by getting rid of customers.

  19. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 15 years ago #

    "BlueHost is a shared webhost, because you share the server processor time with your neighbors; BlueHost limits the number of total processes you can run on the server at one time. You are allowed to run 20 concurrent processes. If you attempt to run more than 20 concurrent processes your website may not display properly."

    SO yeah, like any *shared host* they hit you with dazzling high numbers for things like space, but when it comes to functioning dynamically, they will limit you. :)

  20. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Well, all I can say really is that if you want to try it then backup everything, regularly (as in daily) because the day will come when either your site gets popular or they have problems and you won't be able to access your site or they will block you from it.

    At that point you will need your backups to move somewhere else. I'm speaking (writing) from bitter experience here having had an account suspended on bluehost for too much SQL usage and a wonderful 36 hour down period a few weeks later.

    I am now the most paranoid person you are likely to encounter when it comes to redundancy and fall back plans, and once you have people depending on your system being accessible or you have people paying you out of their hard earned cash you just can't take these chances.

    At a minimum (when I'm not testing things as I am at the moment) I probably spend just over double what wehican does per year (about $300). For that I get:

    * A VPS server that I can configure, tune and abuse to my hearts content. I take daily backups of the entire system so that should something happen to the server then I can restore the entire system (MU and all content) on a new server in minutes.

    * External DNS - My DNS is handled by two external companies so there have a total of 8 DNS servers that have the details of my sites at any one time. (I usually only use a single company at a time - so 4 will be active, the other is a backup DNS company). Both have short TTL (Time to Life) settings so if I change an IP address to point to a new server it starts resolving in minutes rather than hours.

    * Email doesn't touch the servers, it all goes via Google for your Domain, so if the servers are down for a short period I can still send and receive emails. Vital to keep customers informed. I have an autoresponse set up on a status email so that customers can send a message to that account and it will reply with the current system status. The message is set manually.

    * Backups - as well as the VPS backup above, my databases are backed up hourly and pushed to Amazon S3, Client uploads are backed up to S3 daily (in between server backups so I effectively get backups every 12 hours). And as an absolute failsafe I also have an Amazon EC2 instance image of my WPMU server setup so that I can get that up and running if the company providing my VPS has problems with it's internet connection.

    There are a few other things but I wouldn't want to bore you anymore :)

    And I have 6 months with Bluehost to thank for it all :)

  21. boonika
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    @cafespain
    Thanks a lot for this... lets call it - tutorial:) If it's not a secret, when you put it all together, what are your monthly costs?

  22. wehican
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    While not WPMU specific, this does have some suggestions about reducing CPU load. Which is always a good thing, eh?

    http://www.hostmonsterforum.com/showthread.php?p=19521

  23. wehican
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

  24. cafespain
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    This site has always had some interesting ideas and case studies from the larger sites on the web:
    http://highscalability.com/

  25. wehican
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    The more I read these forums and the issues with WPMU the more I am convinced I should tackle Movable Type again.

  26. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Well, what specifically do you expect?

    MU to not use resources? Not going to happen.

    The big picture with MU is that it is server level software, which in a nut shell turns you into a web hosts.

    Other web hosting companies don't go out and pick up some $5 "Give me all the space and bandwidth under the sun" account from some budget provider. They go out and get the equipment they need to do the job at hand. If it's a single server, they get a server. If they need a data center, they get a data center.

    So placing blame on MU for using resources which aren't compatible with a rinky dink budget hosting account is not fair to the software when it's trying to be used in an environment it wasn't designed for.

    That's like complaining that a sports car eats too much gas. Well duh, it's a sports car.

    ... "you knew I was a snake."
    -- Natural Born Killers

  27. andrea_r
    Moderator
    Posted 15 years ago #

    .. and it;s only a real issue when you get up over 100 blogs or so...

  28. boonika
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    Ha, ha, ha... I'm gonna search for all lunabyte's messages and copy them. I love that style of his. Btw, he's totally right.

  29. wehican
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    @Andrea

    So you are saying for us hobbyists and special interest people MU will work for low volume traffic?

  30. lunabyte
    Member
    Posted 15 years ago #

    VERY low volume.

    MU's performance isn't necessarily based on blogs, as even 3 or 4 high traffic blogs would use a lot of resources.

    @boonika: :D

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