Bluehost and SSH access

Amongst all the other acts of largesse I performed with the money I was earning in the United States, I also procured web hosting from Bluehost.

I'd read about how you could get SSH access to your account by submitting a form of ID to them, but assumed it had to be done via fax. Being a luddite, exactly what a fax is and how to use one, is beyond me. However, it appears you can submit the ID via email as well (or a ticket, if you can work out how to do it in their ticketing system). As I had to have my ID in scanned form for my U.S. visa application, I had a copy lying around, so I submitted it.

After only five minutes, the ID was approved and I had SSH access. There's useful web pages around detailing how to set up Putty to access your Bluehost account. I still need to work out what I can do with this, setting up Subversion or installing Python are good indicators of what is possible, but aren't things I need.

Edit: Found a link to a blog post detailing how to use Bluehost for MUD hosting. According to the unofficial Bluehost forums, someone asked the live support whether it was okay to host a MUD under their account and the answer was yes. Unfortunately the blog has been removed, but the Internet Archive comes to the rescue.

Edit: Unfortunately, Bluehost isn't suitable for running a MUD or other long running applications on. Apparently, the longest a process can run is five minutes. Just running a Python server process in my shell account, it was killed in around two minutes. Ugh, the top and bottom border Mud Connector have, takes away from my limited widescreen laptop screenspace. I used to have a Greasemonkey script to give me back that space, but it doesn't appear to be working any more.