general questions about bluehost ftp, email access

[pythonscript]

I'm thinking of switching to bluehost as my webhost, and so far, I've been pretty impressed. However, I have few questions about it that I couldn't find in the features section:

1) it said that bluehost offers unlimited imap email accounts. what is the quota on these, and is it possible to automate their set up? as in, have a page on my website where users could sign up for an email in addition to their other services my site offers?

I use ipage right now, and this is impossible, even using a brutal method of POSTing the data to their form. I'm hoping bluehost is easier.

2) also, does bluehost offer unlimited ftp accounts? ipage does, but once again, I can't automate their creation, and I'd like to offer my subscribers an ftp account in addition to their membership (albeit only a 10 MB account since I won't be abusing the unlimited space).

how's media wiki support? I'm guessing I can just install it, right, like I do on my webserver at home?

Thanks for the help! Sorry about the drawn out questions.

EDIT: What about an SMTP server? With ipage I could use smtp.mydomainname but I couldn't find on bluehost if that was possible or not. Thank you!

[felgall]

From the questions you are asking it sounds like you need a reseller hosting account. That's the only way you can prevent someone witrh FTP access uploading a script to take over the entire account.

BlueHost doesn't offer that type of account.

[pythonscript]

That makes sense. I can still have unlimited email accounts and unlimited ftp accounts, right? On my old web host, I used several ftp accounts (all for admin use, no one else had access) that I could limit to certain directories.

What about an smtp server? I used one on my old web host to send mail from my webmaster account, through scripts that I stored on my web server. Is that still possible?

[felgall]

If it iis only you accessing the site via FTP then you only really need the one FTP account since you can set up multiple logins to take you to the different folders without needing additional FTP accounts to do it.

BlueHost does have SMTP access from scripts on your site. They supply a form2mail script they call bluemail or you can use your own (or any other script you find that does what you want). BlueHost do limit the number of emails that can be sent per hour per hosting account though.