WordPress MU

[Cross posted here and on BuddyPress forums).

Hi all,

(I'm going to be using WPMU and BuddyPress for this project.)

We're a charity setting up a network of youth groups, many of which we are already partners with. This means our social network will grow quite fast, (although we'll limit signups to keep growth steady), but it will inevitably grow large with the photo, video, and podcasting abilities we will be giving users.

With this amount of storage/bandwidth in mind, what is the most flexible, cost effective and reliable hosting provider we could use?

I've been hosting my sites on Dreamhost for years and I'm very impressed with them, but will that be enough for this larger project? WP.com uses Amazon S3 apparently, is this a good way to go for media uploads perhaps?

Anybody's experience would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
Alex

You might want to check this: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=11305

and my replies there :)

Dreamhost is actually pretty okay - you will probably have to upgrade at some point though.

One thing I will point out is that it's not the storage and bandwidth you will use up first, it's the RAM & CPU. WPMU + Buddypress + a butt-load of users will ramp up the server pretty hard.

Offloading files to Amazon is down the list right after caching and optimization.

Moving theme files over to Amazon has been discussed a couple of times previous. A search of the forums should pull up the discussion. Someone blogged about their experiences with the process and came up with a plugin:

http://www.ringofblogs.com/2008/04/12/off-loading-wpmu-theme-files-to-amazon-s3/

There's other posts there as well.

There's this plugin for regular wordpress as well:

http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-s3/

There's this plugin for regular wordpress as well:

http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-s3/

its wpmu compatible - has a config file, where the site_admin can configure it so the users don't mess with those settings :-) - never tested it myself though!

Bear in mind you're talking to a total shell/sysadmin noob (but very eager to learn more!)...

I've heard lots about nginx recently, it seems to offer better response times etc than apache - worth using? The only issue is installing on Dreamhost, it's possible but I think you need their VPS offerings.

eAccellerator has been mentioned to me on the BP forums, is this the best in its field, or would memcache be better? Or an alternative?

Regarding WPMU caching, what's the best plugin out there from your experience?

Does anybody know what WP.com uses for all of these elements, is it documented anywhere?

Thanks for your patience and input! :)

its wpmu compatible

Is it? I thought it wasn't. I know RingofBlogs (Elan?) said he was going to take a shot at it but never heard anything further. Considering that it doesn't do thumbnails in the admin menu, that would be an issue for us. (Although I'm assuming that would be an easy fix since you have the urls already.)

If you're on DreamHost and you state that you;re not using a VPS, chances are you;re only on a shared host (Have you read the Is Mu for Me? sticky? You may want to give it a few minutes) and memcache and eAccellerator really isn't an option for you. You may want to take a look at wp-super-cache as that would probably be your best bet.

All wp.com has mentioned is that they're using a specialized install of memcache and "hundreds of cheap servers." Details are limited but sounds like to me it's low end processors with lots (at least 16gigs?) of memory and hard drive space.

Andy occasionally blogs about the topic. Sometimes with pictures:

http://andy.wordpress.com/

Actually, I've found Dreamhost to be pretty flexible lately, and they seem to welcome WPMU setups.

More on the wp.com setup: http://barry.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/new-datacenter-for-wordpresscom/

Barry. Andy. Knew it was one of them.