WordPress MU

I was thinking of starting WP MU and I am looking for a host.

I have gone to Site5, GoDaddy, BlueHost, MT, and Canca. But when I ask if they run MU, they say yes, then I ask if they will let me make it so that people can sign-up for free and they get a subdomain off of it, they say no.

I don't get it. Your sites are all free and people sign-up, and get their blog/site. Why do they say I can't? I want mine to be ran like WordPress.com, EduBlogs, HypeBeast ect. They all let you sign-up for free, and you get an account.

Could you guys fill me in on this? Am I not understanding something or what?

I want to go with Site5, so what should I get for a package/what should I ask them. I only want a small site for about 100 people to sign up, they will all get about 750mb of space.

This is a message I got from Canca when asking if I can use WPMU:

WordPress MU can be installed on our servers (not included in control panel applications though). Please realize that by WordPress MU hosting if you mean to have a website to host free & public installation of this application like the weblog major sites (blogger.com etc) unfortunately it cannot be hosted at Canaca since it needs a fully dedicated server or more servers. If there are any further questions we will be glad to assist.

Also, I saw in the Forums, lots of you said not to pick (mt), why not? They look like a good hosting company.

*fighting with my connection today*

All the ones you listed above are cheap shared hosts. many of them do not allow you to give away free webspace.

WPMU *does* require more dedicated hosting - if you're going to be the next wordpress.com, you'll need a VPS with loads of RAM to start with,. Look for minimum 1 GIG, that should get you settled. I discussed it in detail here:

http://wpmututorials.com/basics/picking-a-web-host/

pSek (the people we use for wp.mu) are actually a great host that will allow you to provide blogs to users with subdomains until you are blue in the face :)

http://psek.com/wpmu/

Also sorry Andrea, but I have to disagree with you (and with others who keep on repeating this) that WPMU does not require dedicated or VPS hosting - sure that's useful if you expand to a great number of blogs (or a great amount of traffic - or are going to be using MultiDB - for example) but starting on shared hosting is going to be just fine for most people.

I'm basing my advice on his *specific* needs. I'm not going to hand out an answer that will leave him quickly upgrading or restoring a large and growing site (if successful).

Surely edublogs didn't start out on a shared account? ;)

Ultimately, it's buyer's choice and buyer beware. I've done a lot of sites on a lot of different hosts.

"Surely edublogs didn't start out on a shared account? ;)"

Actually, yes, it did! A $10 p/month pSek one at that!!!

We run hundreds of wpmu sites at pSek on what are essentially shared servers without any real issues - they're a smaller company so you get personalized help and they look after their clients.

IMO if we keep on rattling of this (also IMO incorrect) info about VPS or dedicated server requirements we're doing MU a disservice and persuading people against using it.

I've used a *lot* of hosts too - so I'm pretty confident that we're good... I even run pingdom.com checks on wp.mu accounts to ensure that the hosting is up to scratch.

upsell... I'm with Farms on this one.. I run several MU domains.. each with 100+ users on one grid server... don't want to discourage. i've run em on slicehost, godaddy, amazon, rackspace (cloud too), vpsland, spry. Ram is not entirely the issue and MU is perfectly fine running on small shared hosts. If you don't know what level of success you might have with your site.. start small. You can always migrate up from there very easily. everyone thinks they'll have 10,000 users and end up with 10.