WordPress MU

Or they're using SANS, and it'll be slow as hell.

But, yeah, definitely not to be trusted.

Golden rule definitely applies to hosting, X 100...

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

"...unless it's Bojangle's Chicken." :)

Mmmmm...

The only place that can give popeye's a run for their money.

I miss it. :(

And that little rathole gas station in Durham. Can't remember which street it was on, but it was about 3 blocks off of 40, heading towards PepsiCo.

Take a dog, drag it through the garden, and even a dog from Yankee or Wrigley couldn't touch it.

I see you both can make any serious discussion a fun and interesting talk. I dont know if people like it or not but you two rock ! :)

If we didn't, we would probably shoot ourselves in the head.

If you can't enjoy doing something, it isn't worth doing, ya know?

I completely agree. Keep rocking.

Just for reference, jumpline doesn't support wildcard dns Can't use wpmu over there.

Great, if only I saw this thread earlier!

Oh well....

They don't support wildcard DNS with their system, no.

You can edit your own conf file, and host your DNS elsewhere though, if you're stuck.

Granted, me personally, I wouldn't use jumpline if someone paid the bill for me, and it was unlimited everything. When the end user has to consistently do the job of their tech support, who are mostly clueless, it kinda gets old.

Well, I was recommended Jumpline because you can take more control over the server - recommended by a person with far more understanding of computers than me I hasten to add!

So long as there is a way to do it off server I will perserver!

More on the 'cheaper' shared hosting options as I want to avoid VPS or dedicated hosting.

It would be useful if admin could monitor the activity and CPU/RAM resources used for each Mu blog space.

Is there a way to monitor this for each virtual subdomain. The usual hosting web stats do not provide data for virtual subdomains.

Is there a plugin available? Something that determines server CPU and RAM capacity and returns a percentage of use per blog? If not, would someone be interested in creating one?

Actually Jumpline doesn't allow you to control your space and is about the same as a standard reseller account. They do not offer root access and many of the settings are restricted like wildcard dns.

May want to search the forums as Jumpline has come up before.

"More on the 'cheaper' shared hosting options as I want to avoid VPS or dedicated hosting."

Your call, but most people won't be "too supportive" in helping with that, as its not recommended.

"Well, I was recommended Jumpline because you can take more control over the server - recommended by a person with far more understanding of computers than me I hasten to add!

So long as there is a way to do it off server I will perserver! "

You get chroot access to the VDS. You can modify the a[ache configuration, and php.ini, etc. Enough to run MU for awhile.

You would have to host the DNS off of their network though, if you want to use subdomains. Which, may/may not be possible for you.

Just make sure that if you go that route, that you make sure the DNS provider allows wildcard subdomains.

I just went through an exhaustive 2-day research of hosting providers who support wild card subs and I've decided to go with mediatemple for a number of reasons. Here is a transcription of the chat I had with the folks over at Mosso; I narrowed down my search to these two companies for VDS solutions:

***************************************************************************************

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Will'
Will: Hi welcome to Mosso the Rackspace cloud. How can I help you? May I also get your name and email address just in case we get disconnected?
you: Arnold xxx@xxx.com
you: How much dedicated RAM is included with Cloud Sites?
you: Do you support wildcard subdomains and is this configurable through the interface?
Will: with cloud sites yon don't have to worry about RAM
Will: we scale you to as many servers with as much RAM as you need
Will: but we don't support wildcard DNS right now
you: i see. do you have an iphone app for administering sites?
Will: not quite yet
you: u mean it's in development?
Will: I don't know of any one developing it, no
Will: but third party companies are always developing apps for new software
Will: so that doesn't mean it's not getting done
you: and, as far as support for wildcard domains, is that something that's on the mosso roadmap for the near future?
Will: to be honest I haven't heard of any plans to add it
Will: it's not running to well on our loadbalanced architecture right now so we'd have to do some development
you: well, thank you for answering my questions. i appreciate it as it has helped me have more information in choosing a hosting provider. good day :)
Will: my pleasure, you have a great day as well

***************************************************************************************

What I liked about mediatemple on top of its support for wild card subs (configurable through their control panel) is the iPhone application for administering site services remotely. Noone else I researched (e.g. bluehost, fatcow, 3ix, GoDaddy, etc) offered this feature.

I hope this helps anyone looking for a solid hosting provider.

As an aside, if anyone knows of an iPhone app to monitor about 100 servers, I'd love to know about it. I can do it in Safari but it;s kind of a pain.

Folks may want to search the forums for discussions about running mu solely on a cloud setup. I think most of us (ie those who listen to Andrea) are saying that is a bad idea if you plan on growing your install.

Using it for file storage though may be something to consider though:

http://www.ringofblogs.com/2008/04/12/off-loading-wpmu-theme-files-to-amazon-s3/

http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-s3/

"I think most of us (ie those who listen to Andrea) are saying that is a bad idea if you plan on growing your install."

Lol. :D

andrea_r
'
But in our vast and varied experiences, you're going to be hard pressed to find a host that a) will allow you to set it up in the first place, either because they don't do wildcards or it violates their TOS, or b) lets you on, but as soon as you get a few blogs, boots you off the system for being a resource hog. Or worse - lets you stay, but throttles you down so your users are not happy with performance.

Yes, I *know* it's affordable and tempting. I learned the hard way when my former host even went and changed their TOS to boot me off. And of course they can do so without notice.

They may offer tons of bandwidth and space, but you will never ever use it before you throttle down the server with db requests, and go over whatever max_user they have set for MySQL. Which for some hosts is frighteningly low.
'
So basically what you are saying is that its pointless to do the nessesarry modifications to make bluehost or other hosts like it inorder to run wildcard subdomains, because they will most likely do one of the things you previously stated? So even when its possibe to run a wildcard subdomain on bluehost your better of just looking for another host?

Thank You

If you plan on your site getting any size, yep.

I've only come across a couple of shared hosts that are okay with MU setups.

andrea_r
Thanks alot! :-) By any chance do you have some examples of hosts that are ok with MU?

I installed WordPress MU on my Windows PC to evaluate it while studying options for a site that will be on Linux. I run local instances of Apache and MySQL on the PC. I can't get the subdomains to work, though, and have found no instructions covering my situation.

My development practice is to use devlocal.example.com for my local environment, dev.example.com for a Linux development environment, qa.example.com for a Linux QA environment and example.com for production. (I'm using "example" here as a substitute for the domain I intend to use, of course.)

When I installed MU, I chose subdomains (as opposed to subdirectories) to separate the blogs. My problem is that the instructions for wildcard DNS records don't seem to apply in my hosts-file-based Windows environment.

I have an entry in the hosts file of the form

127.0.0.1 devlocal.example.com devlocal.onespecificblog.example.com

(I've tried it without the "onespecificblog" item, too.)

In httpd.conf I have entries like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName devlocal.example.com
DocumentRoot C:/Apache/Apache2.2/example_com
UseCanonicalName Off
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName devlocal.example.com
ServerAlias devlocal.*.example.com
DocumentRoot C:/Apache/Apache2.2/example_com
UseCanonicalName Off
RedirectMatch 301 (.*) http://devlocal.example.com$1
</VirtualHost>

When I browse to devlocal.example.com, I get to the main WordPress MU page, as expected. But if I browse to devlocal.onespecificblog.example.com, I just get redirected to the main page again. Why that happens is obvious enough; it's because of the RedirectMatch line above.

What I just don't understand is what MU is supposed to do with this to somehow display the onespecificblog blog rather than the main page. Is there some way to make this work?

Well, maybe I get this a little more now.

Maybe MU supports only

a.devlocal.example.com
b.devlocal.example.com

and not

devlocal.a.example.com
devlocal.b.example.com

I made some progress in this direction by

1. Changing the hosts file to have:

127.0.0.1 devlocal.example.com a.devlocal.example.com b.devlocal.example.com

2. Commenting out the second VirtualHost block above and adding this to the first VirtualHost block:

ServerAlias a.devlocal.example.com b.devlocal.example.com

WPMU only supports blog.domain.com or domain.com/blog. It seems rather odd to want to to xxx.blog.domain.com.

Also WPMU expects you to be using some sort of DNS server with the wildcards set up on there. If you are on an internal network then you'd need to contact your network admins and ask them to set it up, or if you are running your own DNS server you can update that yourself to support the wildcards for your domain.

I'm sure you can achieve it doing horrible things by manually editing your hosts file and your apache config file for every blog you want to add but its a complete pain and wont work the minute anyone else wants to access it, unless you've added all those aliases to their hosts file as well.

If you're just testing it locally on Windows to give it a whirl, and plan on setting up the live site on linux, just add the subdomains manually in your windows hosts file.

Try not to screw aroudn with MU's rewrite rules and stuff, you'll add to your headaches when you really set it up.

is there ANY way to make WU run WITHOUT wildcards?

i mean, really... i've got mine setup as blog.domain.com... i'd prefer that users that signup for their own blog be blog.domain.com/user instead of this silly user.blog.domain.com stuff...

i do not have the ability to run wildcards on my server.. so if there's no way around it, i'm just gonna have to give up on the idea i had... it's waaaay too hard for me to change hosts right now with the amount of stuff i've got on my server..plus, it's my livelihood, and i really don't want the downtime.

thanks a bunch!

Yeah, pick "subfolder" on the install screen. It's right above where you plunk in the db details.