WordPress MU

Hi all,

What kind of hosting plan is ok for WPMU site ? Do we have to buy vps hosting for a professional plan? Or if we buy a normal hosting ( normal means best non-vps hosting plan ) it will be ok? How many people can we reach with vps and non-vps hosting? Which hosting company do you suggest?
we buy a normal hosting but after a year we want to move to vps hosting, will we have a problem when moving?Thanks

Some hosts don't allow shared account users, certain things that are needed to run MU.

It depends largely on the hosting company or the datacenter. I have servers with Liquidweb and Servint and just based on personal opinion WPMU runs better on my Servint VPS. I havent really tested this for exact numbers.

Dont expect to get the greatest results from these fly by night hosts. You get what you pay for.

Get a VPS. You can get a cheap one to start, too. If you are trying to take this seriously and set up a site you expect to get lots of users, starting out on shared is asking for trouble. Also, if you look at all the threads under Installation, with many people having trouble & errors installing, 90% of them are on shared hosts.

You're not going to be able to build a money-making site on $5/month hosting.

Bandwidth is nothing, space is nothing. Memory & CPU are all-important, and those are the things shared hosts will throttle you on.

As for moving, a server-to-server transfer of WPMU is no different than moving any other large dynamic site.

get a real dedicated server for a price of VPS.
i tried many of hosters already, but all i can recommend is http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ds5000/

you'll get real dedicated server with:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Dual Core
RAM 4 GB DDR2
HDD 2 x 400 GB SATA II (Software RAID 1)
NIC 1 GBit OnBoard
Backup Space50 GB
TrafficUnlimited*
----------------
Price: 59,- Euro / month

The only workable VPS hoster i tested was:
http://www.webhosting.uk.com/

No DreamHost or so was able to deliver usable VPS speed or network speed.

buzz

so dreamhost PS is not recommended? they have such a great control system...

Sorry I didn't get it.

When you say shared is it something like having a normal cpanel account from a free hosting provider?

So does it mean that people who uses a free cpanel account (in oppose to WHM account) wouldn't be able to use WPMU to create subdomain for new blog registration?

A free web host would probably be worse.

If installing MU and giving away free blogs doesn't violate the TOS, the resource usage will eventually get you kicked off shared hosts.

Doesn't really have anything to do with whether it has a control panel or not, it's just shared hosts are more likely to have that.

Hi,

May I know much ram do we actually need to run WPMU?

I was initially on VPS with 384mb ram setting up
my WPMU site. It uses up all the ram and screwed
up my server. So I upgraded my VPS hosting plan
to 512mb of ram. But the ram usage still spike to
more than 90%! And that was just me using the site.
I can't imagine what it'll be like when I open my
site to public.

Is there a trick to optimize WPMU that I missed out?
Thanks in advance.

Best Regards
Simon

what do you mean it uses up all the ram? exactly what used the ram?
apache or mysql?
how many processes/children?
more info needed..

In any case WPMU needs lots of RAM.

I mean WPMU as a whole. When ever I log in to
my WPMU site admin, the memory usage spike (above
450mb now). erm... exactly which process, I do not know.
I'm a newbie first time VPS user.
Here's a prt scr from my WHM => blog1.imoocity.com.

Is there a number to "lots of ram"?

Appreciate your help.

Best Regards
Simon

From my experience basic WPMU installs (up to 200 users) run better on shared hosting because a 'real' server stands mem and cpu spikes well.

For 'heavy' WPMUs (500+ users) it's reasonable to start thinking about a dedicated server.
Of course, these things also depend on the amount of plugins you have and on general activity of your users.

Simon - if you're using up that much RAM and the site isn't even open, then it's an errant plugin.

At least, 99% of the time it is, IME.

What plugins have you got in there?

Also, sometimes it depends on the VPS host. If you had to install the OS to your account, they usually count the RAM used by that. For example, on Slicehost, a 256 mg ram account will barely run the OS and WPMU with no plugins.
But on another host, it runs fine with the same amount of ram.

Well, i had the following plugins installed.

1) plugin commander
2) monty spam
3) Cimy User Extra Fields
4) cets new blog defults
5) WPMU Dev Upgrades
6) WPMU Dev Support System
7) WPMU Dev Who See Ads
8) NextGen
9) WP ecommerce
10) Mailpress
11) SimplePress Forum

And I'm with FutureHosting which came with Centos OS, WHM/Cpanel, mail server and some other necessary modules pre-installed.

Something is up, because I've got the next jump up in RAM from you, same host, and my main WPMU install running with a load of plugins & users, PLUS all my other domains, PLUS some hosted clients.

Start combing over you error logs and do a top via ssh.

hotohori8899, do these:

3) Cimy User Extra Fields
10) Mailpress

work well in WPMU?

I tried both some time ago and neither was working properly.

I haven't test them extensively yet. I played with them a little on my previous install in my Hostgator shared hosting, which seems to be working. With User Extra Fields, I was able to create a "agree to TOS" checkbox and got it show up(and working) in sign-up page. With Mailpress, I was able to send test mail using the build in test function with gmail smtp.

On current VPS install, I haven't test User Extra Fields yet and couldn't get gmail smtp to work on Mailpress.

You may want to try them again with their latest version. Try to download from from the author's site. Sometimes the download link at wordpress or wpmu dev site are not updated.

My real problem plugin is WP Ecommerce. Couldn't get it to work properly no matter what (...and I stupidly paid for the add-on). I finally gave up and now looking for alternatives.

Try removing every single plugin, even in mu-plugins, then let it run overnight and monitor the server again, see how much ram it uses.

If it;s still up there, may need to tweak the server a bit.

Re: wp e-commerce: They were working on it but it's been awhile since we heard back from them:

http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=8191
http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2638

I always get conflicting reports with e-commerce. it works, then the next version of something it doesn't and then back again.

Hi guys. Thanks for the advise.

I moved back my installation to my shared hosting. Though I still do not believe my experience with the vps ram usage is normal. I'll sort that out later using andrea's advise.

Venturemaker,
you might want to try out User Extra Fields again. It's working well as far as I know. I created a country dropdown box to let user choose their country during signup. It work. I also tested to put a simple code on my front page and it was able to display a list of current users/countries. I think this is one useful plugin. However, it does not support multiple selection in dropdown yet.