Soon after I enabled SSH access at bluehost, I wanted to play with some Django projects that I had. I mainly use git as my revision control software, so I tried typing git clone jefferya@programmerq.net:path/to/repo.git. The command wasn't found, so I decided to install it.
In environments where I feel like I need to install software into my home directory, I usually create a ~/local directory, and add appropriate entries to my $PATH. I just did a wget to download the git source package, and when I configured the build, I used ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local. This installed beautifully.
I tried my command again, only to find that it times out. Outgoing SSH is blocked from the slicehost shell account. I understand that SSH access is powerful, and is only available for me to administer my site. Even so, it was a bit frustrating.
update: SSH doesn't seem to be blocked anymore.
The git protocol seems to be blocked also.
I can, however, create bare repositories on my bluehost account, and push to it from outside. This does have some advantages, but isn't very conducive to a regular workflow with git.
Another alternative I have is to do a git clone over http. This is a less-desirable method, but it definitely gets the job done. A workflow that might work would be committing to my local repository, pushing to my public repo (made public by my git server and over straight http), pulling from my public repo to my bluehost (deployment) repo, and pulling from my bluehost repo back to my local repo.
When a git repo is made available over plain old http, you need to run git-update-server before changes will be made visible to clients trying to pull. I believe that this has something to do with the fact that there is no standard way to do a directory listing over http.
It's too bad that github doesn't seem to make repos available over plain http. Oh well. Please let me know if I'm wrong on this. I think that'd simplify things quite a bit for me.