Informed Networker Blog

Today was a very un-fun day in the history of Informed Networker. As some of you are probably aware, this site is built on top of the open source content management system (CMS) Pligg. Today a hacker began a massive attack on large numbers of Pligg based sites. He was able to break through the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) mechanism utilized by Pligg to prevent spammers from automating user creation and began posting massive amounts of spam comments to the sites, including Informed Networker.

Tonight I cleaned out around 2,000 fake users and hundreds of fake, spammy comments. Additionally, I implemented an Akismet mod that is fantastically handling spam comments (as I knew it would) as well as implementing a new module from Pligg developer AshDigg that implements a multi-engine CAPTCHA model that allows one to choose from varying CAPTCHA versions. As a result we are now running reCAPTCHA, a product from Carnegie-Mellon to perform CAPTCHA and hopefully prevent this sort of spammer attack from occurring in the future.

All that to say - it was a lot of work but things should be running smoothly at this point, and we apologize to anyone who experienced any difficulties with the site, including latency issues resultant from the hacker’s attacks.

I’ve been for Bluehost for a little over a month now and figured it might be a good time to give my first impressions of this shared hosting service. Bluehost is a humongous web host - currently hosting over 370,000 domains. It is also a budget host - costing the relatively low rate of $6.95/mo. It is different from many similar hosts in that it only offers one plan - there are no options for virtual private servers or dedicated servers - everything is shared.

Bluehost is a LAMP based service. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. In other words, it is not a Windows based environment - which generally includes Windows Server, Internet Information Server (IIS), SQL Server, and ASP.NET. Since for the particular set of sites I was working on I was interested in utilizing application code from WordPress and Pligg - both written in PHP, it made sense to utilize Bluehost rather than attempting to scrunch these PHP applications uncomfortably into my current Windows server hosting.

Let’s take a quick look at the distinctive features of Bluehost’s offering. Storage includes 300 GB. If this isn’t enough for you, you shouldn’t be on shared hosting. In fact, if you get over 10 GB you probably shouldn’t be using shared hosting. Each month you receive 3 TB of bandwidth (3,000 GB). This is a significant amount of transfer, equivalent to around 9 Mb/sec.(1) - thats five T1’s. Granted, again, if you are using anywhere near this capacity you shouldn’t be on shared hosting.

Language support besides PHP includes Perl 5, Python, and Ruby. This runs the gamut of popular server-side languages that operate on Linux. The database servers is another impressive portion - you are allocated up to 50 MySQL databases and 50 Postgre SQL databases.

There are dozens more features that could make this an encyclopedic post - but that wouldn’t be very helpful. I’ll just mention in passing a few and then move on to the final features and a few weaknesses.

Additional standard features include FTP, POP3/IMAP email accounts, email forwarders and autoresponders, cgi-bin, ssi support, frontpage extensions (please don’t tell me you actually use this feature), SSH, webmail, SSL support, and automated backups.

Finally, a few features I consider personally attractive that aren’t standard with many web hosts:

• Marketing - Includes a free PRWeb release ($70 value, sends out a press release to major news venues) and a $50 coupon for Yahoo! Search Advertising (pay-per-click based). Occasionally they also have offers for free coupons on Microsoft and Google advertising as well.
• File Manager - They have a very nice file manager. It is a pleasure to work with and includes features such as uploading a zip and then extracting it all through a browser. It also offers editing options, including code editing right on the server with line numbers, code organization, etc.
• Fantastico De Luxe - Fantastico is a large number of web applications that you can deploy to your server with one click. It includes applications such as WordPress (blog), Drupal (CMS), Joomla (CMS), PHP-Nuke (CMS), phpBB2 (Forums), PHPList (Mailing Lists), TikiWiki (Wiki), and Moodle (Classroom).
• Domain Management - You don’t have to buy a new hosting package for each domain, rather you setup your main domain and then can configure other domains, as well as sub-domains. Essentially, Bluehost is ensuring you never have to buy more than one hosting package (unless you hit the high limits they have set, for example 50 SQL databases).

Now it’s time to discuss the bummers. Here are the areas that Bluehost is really lacking in - though I think you will find them largely comfort items rather than show-stoppers:

• The Control Panel is based on an unfriendly IP based scheme rather than a friendly name based scheme. So you can’t just type in cp.bluehost.com, its more like 69.89.31.96:2082.
• The statistics are way slow. Don’t bother looking at your statistics for the current day, they are entirely inaccurate. You have to wait several hours after the day is done before you can expect accurate statistical tracking.
• You have to register your domains with Bluehost. They serve as your domain registrar. This is a little frustrating for those who already have registered domains and for those who don’t like to place all their intellectual property eggs in one basket.
• The servers are reasonably speedy, but my monitoring has shown ping responses at several hundred milliseconds compared to Google’s sub-hundred millisecond responses.
• This isn’t really Bluehost’s fault, b/c Fantastico doesn’t support these applications currently - but I’d really like to see one-click support for Pligg (Digg Clone CMS) and MediaWiki (the same Wiki that powers Wikipedia).

These complaints aside, if you are a small business or an individual looking for inexpensive LAMP based hosting (as opposed to Windows-based), Bluehost is an excellent and generally reliable option. The ability to one-click deploy the popular WordPress blogging application and other similar applications make it a no brainer for anyone who isn’t technically experienced but wants to move quickly into a live website scenario.
(1)3,000 GB * 1,024 = 3,072,000 MB / 30 Days = 102,400 MB per day / 24 Hours = 4266.67 MB per hour / 60 Minutes = 71.11 MB per min. / 60 Seconds = 1.19 MB per second * 8 (to convert bytes to bits) = 9.48 Mb/sec.