WordPress MU

A couple of days ago I asked for advice about using WPMU on shared hosting.

I have contacted and chatted with several hosting services and found several that will let me install WPMU as long as I stick to my promise that it will be used only for my family's multilingual blogs. One host was very clear that they will allow me to do it, but that I will have to look for help on how to do from the wise people in these fora.

However, one hosting company told me one thing that left me puzzled. The technical person (I was forwarded to him by sales) said that my account would be put through stress by WPMU. At that point I though I had no choice but to do more than 10 individual installations of regular WP, but the technical guy said that so many blogs (each language version counts as one) would also put my account under a lot of stress.

According to this person, unlimited bandwidth and space are subject to factors like CPU load, etc. (things which have been amply expalained in these fora). Because of the preceding and because shared hosting involves other customers, your pages can only have 10-20 concurrent visitors at any one time.

Is that true or was he just trying to upsell me to a more expensive package?

On a side note, can I bother people with a request for advice on a good host for WPMU? I will not be handing out accounts. It will only be my family blogging. Because of multilingualism, we will have 12 blogs.

Your help will be most appreciated.

NT

Yes, he was correct. I hadn't heard it explain in terms of 10-20 concurrent visitors before, but it's well-known that many shared hosts oversell and have very low CPU limits.

you may want to check out wpwebhost. they have wpmu-specific packages.

First of all, thank you for the reference to wpwebhost.

The technical person I mentioned in my first post gave me the best lay-person's explanation of shared hosting that I have seen anywhere (and I have read plenty), VPS, etc., for one hour.

I was ready to sign up until he mentioned the 10-20 concurrent unique visitors issue. He preambled that by saying that he was not trying to push an upsell but that, regardless of which host I chose, my needs would be more dependent on CPU than "unlimited" space. He had been so clear and forthright about everything that I was going to take him at his word, but then the skeptic in me told me to double check with the experts. So I must thank you for letting me know that I was given the correct information.

Check out Dreamhost, I have a WP MU site running there and have had no issues. Cost is very competitive, price depends on the payment method and I've never had an issue with any type of overage. They offer unlimited disk and bandwidth and they don't limit CPU. From their wiki:
Our policy on CPU usage is that you can use as much as you would like as long as you do not affect the server or other customers. If you are able to optimize your site correctly, you can use up to 300+ CPU minutes without causing issues, though if your services are not optimized or just very inefficient you can easily bring down a servers performance with very little CPU usage.

Check them out here. If you're interested, I have some promo codes that will save you some money, just let me know and I'll PM them to you.

They recently stopped allowing MU on their shared accounts though.

Otherwise, yeah - they're fine.

I use TMD Hosting who encouraged me to use the WordPressMU. I am running 8 blogs on it today.

While we are TMD Affiliates, VIP Poker Stop has been a client for about 8 months. They provide excellent support and the service comes with tons of other useful applications; did I mention inexpensive too?

Barry Dee

10 concurrent visitors, if my maths is correct, works out at about 864,000 page hits a day, assuming one hit takes 1 second of server time (it generally won't).

Of course, there is caching you can do that would radically reduce the load on the server.

You are right .. But I will suggest never select a host offering unlimited space and bandwidth they will surely ..block you in other ways.

From the reading I've done I think I'm going to sign up with either

http://wpwebhost.com/wpmu-hosting/
or
http://www.tmdhosting.com/wordpress-mu-hosting.html

so that I can install and have a play round with mu and see if it's what I need.

If anyone has experience of either, would be great to hear. Or just put your affiliate links up !

Or just put your affiliate links up !

Actually that's not kosher around here.

Added modlook for northernwolf's post up there as it has an affiliate link. (Just to clarify.)

Removed the aff link, thanks tdjcbe!

I clicked on the wpwebhost to order hosting but got an error message saying that they have bad ssl certificates. Are they a reputable site?

Yes, they are reputable.

That message comes up for me on things like new VPS install. :)

I can't find anything on wpwebhost regarding their domain name prices, and their livehelp chat thingy has been offline for about the last 12 hours - anyone know what their domain name costs are for dot com names?

I didn't even know they sold domain names. just get one from GoDaddy, point it at their (wpwebhost) servers.