Does XenForo work on Bluehost?

Whatley187

Active member
I just spoke with a Bluehost rep and they said that they meet the requirements, but the "safe mode" thing might be an issue. Does anyone have experience using Bluehost with XenForo?
 
I'm wondering if they were on the shard hosting plan or the more expensive ones. I'm dying to buy the software but I don't believe it will work with my current set up. I may just look into a new host.
 
Bluehost works fine with xenForo. I had three sites hosted on them but I've moved them over to a Knownhost after I had random times where the CPU usage would max out and a page could take 20-30 seconds to load (due to other sites on the server I would guess).
 
Yes, technically they meet all the requirements. But trust me, a word of advice of me going through HELL recently with what became an obvious security hole in their servers and I was hacked 3x within a 2-week period. Hacked; forums, tables, databases deleted. Defaced and replaced forum nodes with nasty comments as titles of nodes. Third time planted a virus that caused BlueHost to shut me down and gave me 15 days to resolve it or lose everything as the site would be deleted. They were not entering via passwords or anything, they found a hole in the server. Also had add-ons that wouldn't work their proper ways because of server settings... settings that would be nearly impossible to figure out what was causing the issue. But then when I moved servers, and went with server hosting that kind of specializes in hosting XF forums, those "problem" add-ons worked just fine.

Word to the wise, save yourself some misery and don't go with BlueHost. They are fine for running my blog and stuff like that, but don't put a XF forum on it.
 
Yes, technically they meet all the requirements. But trust me, a word of advice of me going through HELL recently with what became an obvious security hole in their servers and I was hacked 3x within a 2-week period. Hacked; forums, tables, databases deleted. Defaced and replaced forum nodes with nasty comments as titles of nodes. Third time planted a virus that caused BlueHost to shut me down and gave me 15 days to resolve it or lose everything as the site would be deleted. They were not entering via passwords or anything, they found a hole in the server. Also had add-ons that wouldn't work their proper ways because of server settings... settings that would be nearly impossible to figure out what was causing the issue. But then when I moved servers, and went with server hosting that kind of specializes in hosting XF forums, those "problem" add-ons worked just fine.

Word to the wise, save yourself some misery and don't go with BlueHost. They are fine for running my blog and stuff like that, but don't put a XF forum on it.

We've been on Bluehost since August 2011 on KH-Flare without problems; the only hack we've had to deal with was from a staff member that betrayed us. I have a suspicion they weren't really with us since they joined, though.
 
Bluehost is one of many hosts owned by Endurance International. So you are dealing with one of the largest hosting companies on the planet. In any case, I don't see they are necessarily worse or better than other hosts run by the company, such as HostGator. Just remember that any shared environment puts limits on how big you can grow and configure your environment. If you need more power, Bluehost, HostGator, DreamHost and other companies offer VPS and dedicated as step ups where you have greater control. At the end of the day, the customer is responsible for the security of their own sites.
 
Is this directed at the OP? Thank you I am aware of all that, however some people have said Bluehost for some reason was incompatible with XF and have not really said why or what the problems was so I'm looking for more exact info as to what the issue is. Perhaps the problem could be brought to BH's attention and they could resolve it.
 
@Gene Steinberg that's great you aren't having problems with BH but I'm looking for more specific info on reported add-on problems while XF is hosted on BH.
Yes, technically they meet all the requirements. Also had add-ons that wouldn't work their proper ways because of server settings... settings that would be nearly impossible to figure out what was causing the issue. But then when I moved servers, and went with server hosting that kind of specializes in hosting XF forums, those "problem" add-ons worked just fine.

@Anpanman If hackers are hitting BH and Hostgator what's to say they won't or can't hit Mike Edge's server as well? I heard the outage was due to severe storms that took out power.
 
If hackers are hitting BH and Hostgator what's to say they won't or can't hit Mike Edge's server as well? I heard the outage was due to severe storms that took out power.

Any server can fall victim to hackers but the exploit I and many other have experienced aren't targeted at our sites or Xenforo. It is a vulnerability with Hostgator that has been going on for years. In these particular cases, like I said previously, they just hijack the IP to re-direct any site on that particular Hostgator shared server to their link farm. I know a lot of people who use Hostgator and Bluehost and have never had a problem so it's hit or miss.
 
Out of curiosity, what specifically is it about Bluehost that seems to be incompatible with XF? If heard some ad-on's don't work but no one has said why.
If I knew exactly what the problem was, it could have been addressed. All I know is that was told by many developers when an add on failed totally, threw errors, or just didn't work in all ways they should have, that it had to do with the server settings. At first I passed this off on people just passing the buck and not taking ownership for maybe coding issues. Was told that the types of errors that it was throwing (on one occasion) would be nearly impossible to determine what was causing it within the server and only BH could really help me. Problem is, BH is not up to par on XF software and such, so when you ask them about it, they say "everything is fine on the servers." -- So I wish I had an answer for you, and for my own self as this would have alleviated a lot of headache for me. When moving servers, I was thinking "if I don't know what settings within the server that could be causing these add on issues, then how will I know it won't happen again on the next server?" A person here helped me with re-coding a portion of an add on to make it work with the server issues for a work-around. He also said it would be nearly impossible to figure out what on the server was causing it, but that he was able to tweak the add on to bypass whatever it was. All I knew was that @Mike Edge was known for hosting XF forums on his servers, and had really great Customer Service, so this is why I went with him. I went with him more so for the security versus the add ons, the add on issues was able to work around luckily. But, then to my surprise, noticed after moving... one add on in particular that was custom coded for me to do something outside of its out-of-the-box capabilities, that did NOT work on BH, now did on Mike's servers.
 
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