Dear Bluehost.com Customer,

It has been a while since I have personally sent out an email. I apologize for that. Normally, I try to be more informative. I am writing today to announce some great speed improvements that we have made to Bluehost!

Bluehost now supports FastCGI!!

Great - What is it??

Without getting too technical FastCGI is an option in the control panel that you turn on that will allow PHP scripts on our servers to stay in memory and avoid running the PHP interpreter each time a PHP script is run. This greatly reduces server load! Currently enabling FastCGI for your Bluehost account is OPTIONAL. It is NOT enabled by default. You can choose to enable FastCGI by logging into your Cpanel and clicking on the new link titled “FastCGI Acceleration”. We have tested FastCGI extensively for several months and have many of our own custom enhancements to make it better in our environment than any other shared host in my opinion! Please take a moment to enable it on your account. The more users enable it, the faster our shared servers will go! (Thanks to Rob Brown for all his custom work to make the FastCGI Bluehost version 10X better than everyone elses!!)

On August 1st, 2007 we will change FastCGI so that it is enabled by default for all users. At that time if there are individual users that have a specific reason to have FastCGI disabled they can disable it at that time.

Our knowledge base article on FastCGI can be located here as well -

Our Knowledge Base Article

FastCGI is only the first step in a series of speed improvements that are coming. Thanks for staying with us, and for telling your friends about us!

For answers to your hosting questions please visit our customer run forum located at -
http://www.bluehostforum.com

For the personal side of Bluehost you can also visit my blog directly at -

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com

FastCGI for PHP

FastCGI for PHP makes all your PHP applications run through mod_fastcgi instead of mod_phpsusexec. FastCGI applications are fast because they’re persistent.  There is no per-request startup and initialization overhead.  This makes possible the development of applications which would otherwise be impractical within the CGI paradigm (e.g. a huge PHP script, or an application which requires a connection to one or more databases).

Benefits:

• PHP scripts will run faster. The PHP interpreter is loaded into memory rather than calling from storage for every hit, greatly improving performance of your scripted site.
• You will use less Server Resources. Since the server does not have load the PHP interpreter for each hit, you will be able to accommodate a higher traffic site without exceeding your CPU quota.
• NO modifications to your existing code are required. Everything you currently run will work with FastCGI for PHP.

Potential Problems:

• You will only have one php.ini file available for all subdirectories (/home/USERNAME/php.ini). This is necessary to help optimize the website code as much as possible. If you need multiple php.ini files to accommodate different scripting needs, you can disable FastCGI for PHP on any of your subdirectories while leaving the rest of the account enabled for performance. Please contact support if you need to do this.
• There can be a few minute delay in any updates you make to your PHP environment (ie, php.ini changes). Since your php.ini is loaded into memory for greater speed, every hit does not re-read it from storage.