WordPress MU

Yep, very low. there's a lot of "if"s and "it depends".

@wehican - you're running a really low traffic private site, yes? with a small number of blogs? (my memory's a bit fuzzy) If so, in your case you *should* be okay, but I'd still keep an eye out just in case my host wanted to play hardball. Which, they have done.

but *in general* luna & I give these kinds of answers because there's always someone reading along who will take some special-case answer and then whine when it didn't work for them and their different special case. :) knowwhatImean?

@Andrea

Thanks for the reply, and it is as your memory recalls.

I can understand the variables, but it is scary thinking that you may put a lot of time and effort into something that might take off and then run into the issues lunabyte and yourself say will happen.

I don't know anything about coding, but reading that last article I posted in this thread it appears that php functions, along with the RSS and a myriad of other things can cause some problems. Since MT4 is CGI and uses static pages a lot, and I have tons of disk and database available, I am coming to the conclusion that MT may be a better alternative to me, and maybe others taking advantage of cheap web hosting to satisfy our objectives.

wp_super_cache will help you a lot in this regard, as it will generate the static pages for you and that Google api plugin mentioned in the first link you posted is handy for offloading some bandwidth as well (can't remember who wrote it now, but their name is vaguely familiar)...

As I said a bit earlier, before I set off on a "tutorial". Try it and see, but take regular backups (on to your computer or Amazon S3, don't leave them on the server) so if the worst should happen then you can recover quickly and without needing to wait for your host support crews time and kindness. If you are on a cPanel controlled host (I think Bluehost still is) then you can generate a back of your site by clicking a link.

One thing I would suggest though is to move your DNS to an external company (everydns.com are free "donation supported", I use paid solutions with different companies, but use everydns as a fall back) then if you do need to change hosts it's a matter of just changing the IP address with everydns (quick to resolve) rather than having to change nameservers (longer to resolve) at your registrar.

Also, you can setup a wildcard dns really easily, so it's only the Apache side of things the host can mess up :)

@boonika:

Now available for your reading pleasure:
"The selected quotes of lunabyte".

"It's like complaining that a quotes book has too many quotes. Well duh, it's a quotes book."

:)

I was just tu install wp-super-cache and than I saw last comment on donncha's page (by game named Neil):
http://ocaoimh.ie/2008/08/20/wp-super-cache-067/

What do you think about it?

I think wp-super-cache works fine and if you are worried whether they are cached or not after install, view your page and it should say at the bottom of the "source" of page it is cached. As well, it creates files in the wp-content/cache/ directory as well. Only other thing to check is the .htaccess is updated properly.

Other than those things, it works 100%.

Trent

Thanks Trent.

I have put my MU install on Bluehost. They dont have wildcard subdomains, so then you can't use it. All you can have is subdirectories. Besides that, everything works fine.

wow that's what I call responsive :P, thanks for the response guys. Actually yesterday bought that infamous bluehost hosting package and this morning after reading all this yesterday called and canceled it, keeping the my domain tho. So now I'll change "finally launching" for "finally knowing where to start" with the server and all that, I plan to get a server under Media Template, a small one for starters and later on I plan to expand it as the site grow.

Thank again for the answers guys.

I think that you'll do better (less expensive anyway) with Slicehost... at least that's my conclusion after reading cafespain's posts. And somehow I trust him, after all the plugins and other stuff he did for/with WPMU.

For VPS solutions after being around dedicated servers, I am extremely happy with Slicehost myself.

Trent

The only "problem" with slicehost is that you are pretty much on your own. You have to install the webserver, database etc... and configure everything so I'm not sure it would be suitable for everyone (fantastic though it is, and it honestly isn't that difficult thanks to the wonderful step by step articles that they provide).

I think, though correct me if I'm wrong as I often am, that the MT VPS has pretty much everything configured for you already.

Yes it has. When You compare storage, prices are little higher at (mt). $50 for 20GB of storage place compared to $20 for 10GB of storage space which you can get from Slicehost. But than again, (mt) offers 1TB of bandwidth and Slicehost gives you 100GB. Now I don't know how much you have to pay to Slicehost to increase allowed BW usage.

Bandwidth is reasonable: http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#bandwidth but if your site is attracting that much attention then it may be time you either upgraded to a bigger slice (with more bandwidth) or got a new slice to share the load.

I did some napkin based calculations before I signed up and figured that if I really needed to then I could offload a lot of my static content to Amazon S3 and for less than $20 extra a month (still less than MT's $50) I could match the storage and more than double the available bandwidth.

My napkin, unfortunately, got a bit soggy - I was in the pub at the time (sad I know), but I haven't needed to do anything drastic yet.

Remember also, the basic MT VPS is also a 256mb VPS and you HAVE to run Apache in that memory as well. A lot of the more expert users over at the slicehost forums don't recommend Apache in such a limited amount of memory as it tends to use a lot itself. By all accounts Litespeed or Nginx are the way to go with such a small amount of memory.

Kicking in my 2 cents for futurehosting.

Honestly, if your site is busy enough to use 100GB of bandwidth, you probably won't be on a VPS. :)

Nginx is something about I read a lot these days. Will have to get more info about it.

I originally had Nginx installed on my server and it worked fantastically. Really fast.
I uninstalled it though and installed Litespeed for an experiment. It seems just as fast but has the added advantage of having a web-based control panel for ease of use.

I will probably look into putting Nginx back on, or have one server with Litespeed and a second with Nginx and see how they compare. But it sure did open my eyes.

Note: I think Wordpress.com is now using Nginx (they were using Litespeed previously).

Yes they are using it for a while now... and I'm sure that they have a 'fat' reason for it. Keep us informed. Thanks.

Did anyone of you managed to setup WPMU on Media Temple's dv (dedicated virtual)? If You did, please let me know what's the procedure. I have problems with displaying user blogs (subdomains). My last hope is adding wildcard record, adding some code via SSH as root user and adding two files inside 'conf' directory. But before I do that I want to know if there's any other way to accomplish this. I don't have any experience with Putty, VI and similar applications and I don't want to screw entire server. Thanks.