WordPress MU

Hello All,

I am researching the architecture for a large site/number of blogs and I am trying to find answers to some issues. Hopefully some of you may have already resolved them:

1. I understand I can use the plugin to split the database into multiple ones and across servers. This has solved my DB scaling issue to an extent.

How do you handle uploaded files and disk space? If the blogs will contain photo galleries, the disk will fill up quickly.

2. I plan to build custom dashboard for my customers because I need to restrict most of the functionality and collect additional information.

Anything I need to watch for other than populating the correct DB tables? I do not think it would be an issue, but I need to make sure that is the case.

3. Any recommended hardware/requirements per X number of blogs on a server?

Thank you for your help guys :)

"If the blogs will contain photo galleries, the disk will fill up quickly."

Not as quick as you think, IME. :) Disk space is cheap. Also, we have an image resizing plugin we're releasing soon, so users can't upload 4 megapixel images to their blog posts. (which they will)

Get as much memory as you can afford. That's pretty much it.

Gotta love folks who upload 4 meg images and wonder why their space fills up so quickly and wonder why it takes grandma an hour to download a webpage of 20 of those images over her dialup. Of course it's actually my fault that the system can't handle it.

*sigh*

You may want to take a look (and search the forums) for the solution with amazon's s3 program and think about offloading uploads to their service. It's fairly cheap and, for the most part, fairly reliable.