WordPress MU

I have been going through the forums trying to narrow down a hosting service that will fit my needs.

Also I have been trying to cobble together a pre-install list for things I should ask the hosting company, etc.

Right now having apache is obvious, and making sure Wildcard is activated...

Our there other things to make sure are covered before I even attempt to get things started?

Other than the apache wild cards . . .

Nothing beats a good response from their help desk. Some shared hosts are trigger happy when it comes to shutting down busy sites. And wpmu can/will grow to excede "entry-level" shared hosting very quickly.

Can more cpu/memory be added to your account if needed?

Make sure you have an account you can "upsize" without simply getting punted from their service.(ie you simply get billed at a higher rate as your site grows)

If/when you move to a bigger/faster box, how will they handle the migration?

These lessons can be learned the hard way.

Oh, and phpmyadmin and ftp access(editing files, permissions, and .htaccess).

Just starting out, give Media Temple's Grid Server a shot.

If you beat the 1:1000000 odds and need to move up to something better, they offer it and can help.

lunabyte,

Do you host with Media Temple's Grid Server? What can you tell me about them? How many blogs are you hosting?

No, I don't. I run my own boxes.

I do have friends and associates that do use them, and have been satisfied with the services.

For MU, the only reason I mentioned it was that a couple of folks mentioned it here that they have been using it.

It would at least be a fair price, and good service to get you going.

Max requests to the database. :) See if they have an abnormally short limit. WPMU is heavily db-driven.

Also mod_rewrite enabled.

MT can handle it, but if it gets too big you'll be looking at dedicated options either way.

How big is "too big"? :D Number of blogs or number of *prolific* bloggers? Or does it matter in the long run?

Just pondering.

I would reckon most likely a combination of both those, plus traffic and hits on the database.

I wouldn't even want to make a stab at a number, but if you get to where the site is causing strain on their grid MT at least has the reputation of letting you know and working towards a solution.

I know for me personally, dedicated becomes the only option once the overall environment reaches a certain level. That level being a factor of these three things we're talking about. Those being total number of legitimate users, activity of those users, and overall number of pages being served. Also, I keep an eye on the overall resource use as well. Things like failed spam attempts and blocks by bad behavior still eat stuff up. Granted, not as much as a full hit, but it still does impact it as well.

Gimmie some hard numbers, or at least an algebraic expression. ;)

I'm talking with them now to see if they can define "small" for me as I was also with site5 and am looking to move (jerks!) .. sucks too, cause other than that they have been really good, in fact I'm keeping all my non wordpress sites on there ...

Somewhere - NOT on their main TOS page, they have buried new TOS where it says you can't offer free blogs.

So they were jerkwads to you too, huh?

Yeah I saw it off a post in here somewhere - like I said I am talking to MT now to see what they support..

well they weren't kicking up a fuss 'yet' .. after I read your stuff last night I made an inquiry and they confirmed that they don't support it, and as I am still in the building stage I don't have the problem you did, but now I need to migrate to a new server ... bleh

I think other here have been using MediaTemple with great success.

Yeah. MT is pretty good though. If you need to scale, they can help you out too. Meaning, move from their Grid to one of their dedicated boxes.

Im running about 20 blogs, and 5 coppermine galleries from media temple dv (virtual dedicated) base unit. $50 a month.

My php and mysql intensive galleries serve about 50,000 page views a day (damn I just worked it out, had no idea it was that high).

Five of my blogs get about 8,000 page views a day each, and the rest a 1,000 or so.

So thats roughly 100,000 page views a day, and the MT server can handle it okay most of the time with no probs.

I did have to tweak apache somewhat though, the default MT setup let far too many processes spawn for the ram. I also installed X-cache (php cache) which helps a lot.

--
Hey lunabyte, who do you have your boxes with?

I've got about a dozen or so scattered over a couple providers.

I've got boxes with RackSpace, ServerBeach, and SoftLayer pretty much.

Just depends on what I'm doing, and what I need from the network as to where I add a box.

I need to name my racks someday. 1 and 2 just doesn't do it for me.

Thanks for the info, I won't really be able to tell one provider from another right now, the only difference I could tell is the price.

I was looking at layeredtechnologies.com for a while, as their prices seemed the best for what they offer.

I think 40gig space+, 1gig ram, average CPU, 100mb port (probably?) and 1TB bandwidth, + Plesk should do well for me.

I am hoping to make the switch to full dedicated soon.

Heh... I could offer up some great rack names Doc. LOL

Matt, a lot goes into choosing a host. If that's a dedicated box, I'd run away from it.

You can get a decent starter box for about $125 a month or so. With MU, you don't want a control panel on the box either. That's just another thing to eat up additional resources when it isn't really needed.

I found http://www.layeredtech.com from Photomatt.net (wordpress) and for currently hosting wordpress.com.

If they are good enough for Matt and wordpress, im sure they will be okay for me lol.

What I quoted was not what there were offering, just what I think I need / would be fine for me.

Checking out http://www.layeredtech.com/dedicated-servers/small-business.php

I'm tempted by their offerings (I don't want to spend a bomb), and I also don't want a pile of crap lol.

I would probably want plesk or other control panel to make things easier for me, ie managing / starting / stopping mysql, adding domains, apache. I simply don't know enough to run with out one. Im still very much a novice.

Also, while we are on the subject. Any recommendations OS wise? With Media temple, im currently using CentOS. Silly questions, but with a 64bit CPU, makes sense to go with the 64bit version of the OS?

Many thanks again.

Cent's great. It's on most of my boxes, save a few with RHEL.

I can't really say you'll need a control panel, it should come with webmin which will do ya just fine.

For restarting common services, you can map certain custom commands so that they are easy for you to remember.

As a server from those folks, I can't say. Never used em.

I appreciate your advice lunabyte, thanks very much for your time.

I guess I will go with CentOS 64bit.

As for a panel I guess it's not too necessary. I would feel more comfortable having some form of panel for adding domains, service control, emails etc. Don't love the feeling of $15 or so extra a month for the option.

My current server with PHP cache (helps a lot), seems stable right now *touch wood*, but not as stable as I would like. I think a dedicated server is a requirement soon.

I think you'll find webmin to suit your basic needs just fine.