WordPress MU

I found the string about hosting from several months ago, but I still don't quite understand what's most important to look for in a host for WPMU. I found one post that said memory/RAM is the most important, but I don't see that shared on any of the hosting co websites I perused (unless they refer to it as something else?) I'm very confused, but would like to offer fast (or at least not too slloooow), dependable blog hosting to keep users interested. Would someone be kind enough, please, to recommend a few hosts? I don't anticipate hosting a lot of blogs, possibly 50 at the most. I know you sometimes get what you pay for and I don't mind going with a mid-price hosting company if recommended.

I'm currently with ehost.net and they have a lot of "time outs" just running MU and one WP, but I've not had any problems in the past few years with them just running the one WP by itself.

I'm looking @ http://www.lonex.com/web_hosting3.html (corporate) & http://www.fluxservicesinc.com/hosting.php.

Suggestions greatly appreciated.

I wouldn't touch either one of those. Both companies are offering what would be the same as a server for the price of lunch. I pay about $100 to run a single box for a month once you work in support and bandwidth. They're offering the same for about $10.

Chances are you're going to get the same timeouts you would be getting with your current host. That and both companies have limits on the number of sites you can host. I doubt they would allow a wildcard dns to be setup.

lonex.com is also just a reseller of Liquidnet. They probably don't even control their own boxes. fluxservicesinc.com is hosted at theplanet which mean they probably have at least one box if not more.

What you're looking at in those other threads are VPS account which is a share of a server. That's why memory is fairly important as it's shows how large of a portion of a server you get with your account.

Most shared hosters are not going to be happy if they find out you're using one of their shared hosting account for reselling. That's what wpmu basically does, even if you don't charge.

From my experience, hosting 50 blogs should not be a problem with most hosts (unless very high traffic).

I used site5 with about 1000 blogs until I had to move.

From my experience working for a couple of hosting companies, I assure you that you are better off in the long run getting your own server. Shared hosts do not typically advertise their CPU/Memory/MySQL usage limits on their websites along with the disk and bandwidth numbers - you usually don't find about those limits until after your account has been suspended, as some here have found out the hard way.

If you aren't a server guy I'd recommend going with a full service dedicated host - one of my boxes lives at AxisHost, and I've found the level of service to be superb, especially for the money.