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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

> Another one from the @pipdig plugin. If you use one of their themes on @bluehost then they intentionally slow your website down by disabling the BlueHost cache plugin, then they can inject content with the title "Is your host slowing you down?"

https://twitter.com/nickstadb/status/1112479746972151808

pipdig is a goldmine.

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On a tangent, let's talk BlueHost.

While the call to host switch is malicious, almost every developer in WordPress world will agree BlueHost, and their parent company with all their 50+ hosting companies, are utter garbage. The only reason they exist is because they have hired an army of bloggers and pay them affiliate income of $65 / signup.

As far as disabling Endurance Cache goes, it is completely legitimate. It's a plugin forced upon BlueHost users, without being told so, and is a "must-use" plugin that most users will never check (and can't be completely disabled from WordPress admin).

Wait... so if I write a WP plugin, I'm entitled to disable other plugins I don't like when people install mine? Of course not. That endurance cache is not the only one, there's a list of "plugins we disagree with" which are disabled:

https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2019/03/peculiar-php-present-...

As for hosting providers: GoDaddy, BlueHost, etc - yes, they're all bad. But that doesn't justify moves like these.

Serious question though, on the technical part: WP needs an advanced-cache.php file, which needs to be in wp-content in order for the cache to work; this will list as dropin. Are you sure the endurance cache is MU and not dropin? (Genuine question).

Which is why I stated it's a tangent about BlueHost and I definitely don't agree with disabling other plugins.

However, I believe it's perfectly valid to disable a forced plugin. If a host forced enabled an almost hidden plugin, without user consent [1], then it's no more evil to undo the evil for the good of users.

As for drop-in vs mu, every other cache plugin itself stays a normal plugin so it's not a technical limitation. That's beside the point though, the plugin is force enabled without user consent.

[1] https://github.com/bluehost/endurance-page-cache/issues/4#is...

Well... the thing with a hosted service is the host needs to protect their arses as well, and WP resource abuse can get fascinating - a mandatory cache plugin is not _that_ bad. It's not The Right Way, but shipping WP without enabled cache or a full page cache isn't either.

I actually understand this perspective, having hosted wordpress sites and having written wordpress cache plugin myself.

I'm curious which host you'd recommend. I want a good host for making websites. Not sure if I need to be a reseller or just use their shared hosting. I'm hoping to create lots of static websites for different small businesses, and then cheaply host them. Considering Namecheap, DreamHost, and BlueHost, but I'm also hoping there's one that allows nudity (not porn, just artistic nudity). Or if there's a host that allows any content, that's a plus.

I've been trying to find non-Amazon or non-Google hosting options, wanting to spend my money elsewhere. Is this a waste of time or effort? I imagine that cloud hosting with Google would be less restrictive, though more complicated to setup.

Thanks for any ideas

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET has strong free-speech policies. But they do expect you to be technically competent. If you're not comfortable with the command line and wp-cli (if you're using WordPress), you probably won't be happy with them.

If you checked them out years ago, they've since added support for custom HTTP servers. It's not as flexible as a VPS, but they're no longer limited to static files, PHP, or CGI. You can now run Django, Ruby-on-Rails, etc.

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