Bluehost enforces a maximum outgoing email per limit on their service. Most tasks, such as personal email, and mass mailings can easily be routed through other mail servers. As long as the process sending the mail does not reside on the server, then it's as simple as changing the settings to use another mail service.

If your application has to run on the server, such as a web application, forum, business contact tracker, or cms, then you are out of luck. There is no way to send email to an outside server from Bluehost. Port 25 is blocked, because that would be open season for spammers. Any sane shared hosting company would enforce the same policy. The only way to get an email out to the rest of the world is to use either the sendmail binary, or connect to port 25 on localhost to send a message.

There ...

So, I want to move away from mod_php for the obvious security reasons.

FastCGI is a good alternative. I want to make the transition as easy as possible for my users. The transition on my Bluehost account from the regular PHP handler to the fastcgi handler is quite easy. All I do is add AddHandler fcgid-script .php to my .htaccess. Here are the requirements that I am looking for in transitioning to fastcgi for php:

1) Easy Transition - little or no user intervention required. I'd prefer that no intervention is required. 2) fastcgi scripts should be run using suexec for security and potential tracking purposes. 3) No scripts should be run when adding/removing users from the system. I want this to "just work" with the mod_userdir setup that we have.

Ideally, this change could be made during scheduled maintenance, and everyone could be automatically using the new fastcgi ...