WordPress MU

Hi--it's been awhile since anyone talked about bluehost, and since I really like them for wp installations, I thought I'd ask if anyone has used them for wpmu. They upgraded their features for their $6.95/mo accounts a few months ago, and I haven't looked into their more premium options.

:) Mimi

Ask them if they support wildcard domains, because last I heard they didn't.

I am with Hostgator using the top shared hosting package. Their PHP memory limit is 40MB, which is within the recommendation of 32-64MB for MU. They do support wildcard DNS and the .htaccess and PHP.ini stuff you could do yourself and support has been great with Hostgator.

I do believe it to be a worthy consideration for a Wordpress MU installation.

I haven't done an install for MU yet, I am trying to decide the best route to go for a forum to use in conjunction with WP. Any opinions would be awesome.

"I do believe it to be a worthy consideration for a Wordpress MU installation."

But you haven't installed it there yet.

Honestly, MU is not for shared hosting. Plain and simple, past a few dozen blogs (at best), you're asking for trouble in one form or another.

What about RAM?
What about CPU usage and simultaneous mysql connections?
If you want the site to grow to any size, you'll soon have to move to a VPS at the very least.

thsi is the voice of experience here, not just advice. :)

As for forum, uh... bbpress? Like the one you're on now? It integrates with MU pretty darn seamlessly. plenty of threads here about it.

I'm using SYN Hosting as suggested on http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/hosting.php

I had a support question and they responded within an hour!

PBO: Any chance of just posting a link to Hostgator instead of using tinyurl to disguise what i assume to be an affiliate link. I mean, it's not as though you are actually compressing http://www.hostgator.com into less characters, so what's the point?

Well, cafespain thats what it seems.

As for me, I am using JaguarPC and they've been great so far. Absolutely great, I must say.

you could try prohosters, thats the cheapest vps i could found on the web

http://www.prohosters.com/

well i spoke with site5, as recommended earlier in this thread and this is their response:

Leslie [8:13:18 AM]: Hello! Welcome to the Site5 Sales Live Chat! How may I help you?
nick [8:13:18 AM]: Hi there,

I have been refered to you by someone saying that your hosting supports WPMU. can youconfirm that?

Leslie [8:14:02 AM]: Hello Nick, we do support WPMU, however there is a problem with the wildcard domains so that is unable to be done.
nick [8:14:28 AM]: ok, so no wildcrd dns?
Leslie [8:14:56 AM]: Not right now, no. It seems it is a problem with CPanel and Apache2.
[8:15:16 AM]: I don't know if or when that will be fixed.
nick [8:15:26 AM]: ok thank you very much

so i think they can be ruled out as wildcard dns is a must for seo :(

bullshits, associazionidifranciacorta.org is running on site5

anyway i got a lot of downtime in the last months so i'm looking for something else... i thinking about eapps.com :)

"Not right now, no. It seems it is a problem with CPanel and Apache2."

Yeah, that isn't right. That's one of 3 things:
1) Too lazy to work within what cPanel provides to make the change.
2) Too incompetent to figure out how to do it with what cPanel provides.
3) An excuse because they don't want to support it.

A well known member here got kicked off of site5 with MU.

MU isn't for shared hosting to begin with.

Having personally been utterly confused when initially investigating the various hosting options (shared hosting, web hosting, reseller web hosting, reseller VPS, VPS, VPS hosting, dedicated server - jeez no standardised terminology) and exactly what I should be checking for, I can now wholeheartedly recommend knownhost.com (VPS XLtx package) whom we've been using since Feb 2008.

We've currently got 10 top-level domains with up to 22 subdomains hanging off each one. Upwards of 70+ plugins (not all activated across all TLD's), with 130+ users.

Their uptime has been almost 100% and their turnaround of technical support requests is simply amazing (even on a Sunday night at 10pm!) No support request is too trivial for them and they've been more than happy to fix my bumbling amateur DNS mistakes etc. I can even describe what I need to do in non-tech speak and they understand what I'm saying - and often just do it for me!

Their knowledge and support of WPMU is pretty much non-existent, but that's fine as I've got you guys here!

And with the Dollar to UK Sterling exchange rate what it is at the moment, our bill every month is RIDICULOUSLY low. I can't believe I was even considering configuring our own server onsite. The support itself is worth the fee!

We also have a backup VPS with futurehosting.biz but I've yet to be as impressed with them...

up to 22 subdomains hanging off each one

I don't see this mentioned anywhere on their site that there's a limit to subdomains but, if that's true, they probably would not support the wildcard dns that wpmu should be using.

Eh, I get a million hits a month on a futurehosting VPS. And I also have 10 or more domains and can't even begin to count how many subdomains. which really, don't even or should not even count on a VPS.

Impressive hosts? Well, no. But most of the time they do their job and they are reasonably priced. And I don't even get a kickback for mentioning them.

tdjcbe: yes, they support and we're using wildcard DNS (in fact this was one of the questions I specifically asked before choosing them, as we specifically wanted unlimited users to be able sign up for themselves with sub domains from unlimited TLD's). It seems not all hosts allow this, which amongst other things made it harder for me to directly compare service providers.

andrea_r: it was after reading one of your other posts that I went for futurehosting.biz as our secondary VPS (WPMU/Drupal development server). Unfortunately, my OWN experiences with FH are that their tech support is not as attentive or as quick to respond as knownhost.com. I can genuinely say that I've been impressed with knownhost.com

I guess being a relative noob to VPS, managing DNS stuff etc, this kind of hand-holding in hindsight has actually proved invaluable to us (which I guess other more competent people like your good self probably don't often need) and I've learnt so much from communicating with them. If I'd had some of the more serious problems with FH, I don't have the confidence (yet) that things would've been fixed quite as promptly.

These are just my own personal experiences and errr...no I'm not on commission either! Although if anyone reading from knownhost.com wants to pay me I can give them my Paypal address. That's KNOWNHOST.COM - have I said it enough yet.... ;-)

look at http://www.hostgator.com they have great and i mean GREAT support, and allow wildcard subdomains, unlimited databases, etc...

i recently moved my mu experiment to futurehosting.biz. moving to VPS has been an interesting experience. I managed to to not break my site. I must say that FH has decent support. I like being able to handle my own support requests for things like wildcard domains, etc. i still recommend FH. Eventually I plan to move all my domains from Bluehost and hostmonster over to FH.

Can anybody recommend any of these host co:
http://www.webhostingpad.com/
http://www.omnis.com/

I wouldn;t use either one. WPMU at either place will outgrow it quickly. Both places state in their TOS fuzzy guidelines as to what they deem to be excessive overages, and note they can (and will) shut you down without notice.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: advertised space and bandwidth does not matter. They are dirt cheap. You will ALWAYS use up the RAM first running WPMU.

I use jetnethost.com and absolutely love them. No matter what time I submit a ticket (1am, 5pm, 9am) they respond within minutes. I was so surprised when I first submitted a ticket and got a response in 2 minutes.

Now you might say that their prices are a bit higher, but believe me they are worth it. A lot of other hosts claim to offer such and such, but they can't realistically do so. Jetnethost offers realistic packages with excellent customer support and still manages to keep prices under $100 a year.

Edit: I wanted to add that I have two sites hosted with them and that I researched the hosting options quite extensively before I selected them. Don't be sucked in by the hype of getting 100K GBs a month for only $4. That is a classic case of too good to be true and is a serious case of overselling.

What about MediaTemple? NearlyFreeSpeech? LunarPages?

MediaTemple has been highly recommended - from another WPMU user. Any comments on their service from this list?

Don't get the Grid. Not if your site is any size.

Hi Andrea,

Could you please disclose a bit more about the amount of traffic your WPMU are getting, (in term of GB/month, # of blog, or # of unique users, ...) ?

And you current configuration plan with FutureHosting ?

You keep mentioning about RAM. Did you have to buy extra RAM at FH ?

This would help greatly in gauging what FutureHosting is capable of.

Thank you in advance Andrea!

I have notice a lot of post are from 2 years ago I wanted to know if they are still reliable?

well I wanted to say jbservers.net is a good hosting and I would recommend it I never used wpmu on it but I use a software called jamroom and its a multi media source so you can upload audio video photos basically creating a purevolume, sounclick type website. There server were made to run this software and if it can handle this software on there shared server and have the websites load rather quickly so I pretty sure it can handle some wpmu and there support is excellent as well.

I plan on using them to run my wpmu site the hosting package I'm talking about that runs the software is the Jamroom Hosting the other packages I can not say they also have virtual dedicated servers for a really good price. All there packages come with a cpanel and wordpress pre installed so u would just need to add mu to it so wont need to install wp core

This is the host I've been using since disappointed by godaddy, hostgator, and dot5hosting

hopes this can help some people
- Joseph

LOL - I know i would sound so naive and noob (which I am by the way) but I am using iPower (I could hear lots of chuckles and see frowning faces). Surprisingly, they're giving me quiet good experience - and have no problems with dns, tld's, subdomains, whatever you call it. I have two MU sites with them - and its on a shared hosting account.

Maybe I will get their VPS if the site grows big in the future.

"This would help greatly in gauging what FutureHosting is capable of."

Let me put it this way - before buddypress took way off, the demo site was hosted on my vps, next to all my other blogs and another mu install. On an account with less than a gig of RAM.

The account gets over a million hits a month.

So, hardware-wise, they can handle it. Upgrades are smooth, you can get more RAM when you need it, they're cheap.

They recently added new support people, and they suck.

"All there packages come with a cpanel and wordpress pre installed so u would just need to add mu to it so wont need to install wp core"

And this shows your complete ignorance of MU. It's a separate program. You don't need to install WP first, then "add" mu.