Just a word of warning. Bluehost recently suspended my account for hosting a 700MB CD image of the Rio Central software. This was the entirety of the suspension email:


No mention of why, no trouble ticket opened. It took 2 days to be able to get at my data, and then another day after that to get the site back live.

I still don't know if their objection to my hosting of the CD was because of space/bandwidth or a potential copyright violation. Anyway, I'm done with them. There's no point in paying for gobs of space that's unusable.

Yeah, that's pretty much the same as the Dreamhost scam, though they seem to be letting me slide (for now) on my rsync backups. I still would like to find something more cost-effective, and was hoping the Bluehost experiment would work out for you guys, but the weird "send us your driver's license for SSH access" was keeping me away. With this news, I think I'll stay away.

Where are you headed next, post-Bluehost?

I only used Bluehost as an experiment and was actually with them for almost a year now without incident.

I run a bit of a hosting company myself by buying a reseller account with Dathorn and then cutting-up the space and bandwidth into a bunch of 500MB, 1GB, 2GB, or 5GB accounts. Clients that make up one tenth of my space usage pretty-much pay for my monthly cost of $200 for 60GB of space.

I don't absolutely love Dathorn, but in over 3 years I really can't complain with the service. Any problems are handled/resolved quickly and professionally. Boxes are not oversold, and are upgraded regularly.

I would love to find a cheap host with massive space that doesn't oversell, place heavy restrictions on CPU time, and has professional support, but it's not going to happen right now.

Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm a little surprised, too.

It looks like Blue/Dreamhost both have the problem that they will suspend your account without warning, which is completely absurd and unnecessary. I know it's in their terms of service that they can do it that suddenly, but why do they need to? Why not send a warning email and at least give the person a day or two to "make it right" or at least straighten it out over the phone.

I have two positive things to say about your situation: at least with Bluehost, you can get in touch with someone immediately via phone. When Dreamhost cut off my account, they were completely unreachable and emails went unanswered for a day or two. Also, with Dreamhost, they didn't just temporarily disable my account, they dropped the bomb and eliminated me as a customer. It took quite a bit of pleading to get them to put my data back long enough for me to download it all and backup my databases. ...I despise Dreamhost

Anyway, I'm doing well with Bluehost so far. I'll be sure to update this thread if the same thing happens to me.

Same here, I am still hosting 60GB of rsync backups with them.

Rob, have you looked at Media Temple? I'm considering them for running a dozen or more web sites under my one account. I've got some 4 sites or so running in my Dreamhost account right now without a problem. The sites other than my own are extremely low bandwidth and storage.

Wow, Media Temple is pretty impressive looking. I will have to check them out some more. It's cheap enough to run my service with Dathorn side-by-side for a while so I can determine how reliable they are.