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Bluehost is probably one of the oldest hosting companies on the internet today (they have been around since 1996!). Being one of the longest running companies means that they are very reliable which is very important when you are looking for a new home for your web site, blog or message board.

The first thing you will notice is that Bluehost run all their servers on Linux and not Windows. Many consider Linux to be a better hosting option as the server tends to be more secure and runs more stable.

Price Plan

Unlike other companies Bluehost do not have a number of different-sized hosting plans. Every hosting plan has the same features and items in it: CPanel, unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, host unlimited domain and so much more.

The only difference is how you much you wish to pay, the more you pay up front the cheaper it will be each month. For example if you pay for three months then it works out to $9.95 per month but it will be cheaper if you stay for longer periods.

Features

A hosting account with Bluehost comes with almost everything that you could possibly need to run your web site, blog or message board. From MySQL databases, cgi-bin, Shell Access, sub domains and so many more feature. Just look at the list:.

There is also the Fantastico feature which has a whole host of scripts that can be installed for you with just a couple of clicks of your mouse button, from blogs to message boards to your own wikipedia type site.

Reliability

Running a website, blog or message board you must be able to pick a hosting provider that you can count on to provide to you a quality and reliable service. It is not good having a hosting who goes down on a regular basis and thankfully Bluehost are a company that are very reliable, otherwise they would not have the reputation they have nor would they still be around some 12 years on.

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How To Make Stattraq Work

Those of you who have WordPress 2.7, or indeed later versions of 2.6, might find that the latest version of Stattraq (1.2.6.4) plugin does not install and provides the following error when you visit the install page:

Warning: main(ABSPATH/wp-config.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/xxxxxx/xxxxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-stattraq/stattraq-install.php on line 19

Fatal error: main() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘ABSPATH/wp-config.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/share/pear’) in /home/xxxxxx/xxxxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-stattraq/stattraq-install.php on line 19

There is a way to solve this problem and it is pretty simple.

You will need to edit the stattraq-install.php file. Don’t panic though because it really is very simple to do and it is only one line.

1. Open stattraq-install.php

2. Find the offending line (in my example it says line 19)

3. You should see:

require_once(ABSPATH.'/wp-config.php');

4. Remove it and add:

$path = '/home/xxxxxx/xxxxxx/public_html/';
require_once($path.'/wp-config.php');

The ‘/home/xxxxxx/xxxxxx/public_html/’ part should be the server path to the folder directory that you have WordPress installed in.

5. run the stattraq-install.php file and it should work now.

Let me know how this worked for you.

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On February 1st I decided to launch a test that would last the entire month of February. The plan was to place pop-up advertising on this blog (as well as my peersonal blog at Dean Saliba Dot Com) and gage the reaction of people by getting them to post how they felt about pop-up advertising.

Sadly the experiment has only lasted six and a half days as I received numerous emails from companies, who had adverts on this blog, stating that they would pull all advertising from my blogs if I did not remove pop-up advertising within 72 hours.

One company even said to me that they do not allow sites to offer popup-advertising or pop-up pages offering newsletter subscriptions. But that is exactly what they allow John Chow to do on his blog. Maybe he can bypass that rule because he has lots of traffic and is a self-titled evil blogger?

I felt that it could have turned into a rather interesting experiment but alas it had to bee cut short. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who gave me their view on the matter either by email or the comments section.