WordPress MU

Hi y'all,

I have looked through a lot of the topics and haven't seen a question like this--I hope I didn't overlook anything. We are looking into buying our own server to put WordPress MU on.

We are thinking of having 30 schools each having their own blog and about 300 users/authors. How big of a server space would we need and anything else? I am new with this and don't know what is the best to get. Does anyone have any recommendations for what to choose?

Thanks in advance!

A dedicated box, 2-4gigs of RAM, quad-core, dual drives (second one for backups).

that'll get ya started. ;)

Anyone else have inputs?

Thanks andrea--I really appreciate your input!

This is how I failed (and what I've learned from it).

• I've signed up with rackspace cloud server (cheap, pay-per-use).
• Started a couple of machines, 256 RAM, 10 GB HDD.
• First machine is for Cherokee Webserver, FastCGI PHP5, APC + WordPress.
• Second one for MySQL.

Results: after some PHP, Cherokee and WordPress tweaks, I could get the script to work (no other users than me). Still using up all the memory on the webserver machine.

Conclusion: Webserver machine has to be powerful (lots of RAM for sure). 256 MB VPS are just not enough.

Obviously the DB server needs to be powerful as well but you may also apply some sort of partitioning (SharDB plugin) to cut the operations on each individual mysql server.

Now I'm moving on to other, more exciting failures (feel free to join me).

Nope, they aren't - if the vps provider is counting the vps portion towards that RAM too. Some do.

Is it safe to assume that the MySQL server uses less memory than the Web server? Meaning that the RAM clogger would be the PHP; am I correct?

Not necessarily. Partly it depends on how they've set it up.

I've set up MU on a 256 ram vps on one host and been okay, and on another host, had to finish building out the box, setting up the email, and had barely enough room left to even visit a fresh new install of MU with nothing extra.

For those with the 256meg boxes, this may be a good read:

http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/yes-you-can-run-18-static-sites-on-a-64mb-link-1-vps/

@Andrea - So it all depends on how you configure the various services. I'll go with some more trial and error to gather knowledge.

@Mike - Thanks for the link. Good read indeed!