Questions about WP Hosting...

[Samalan]

Hello,

Lately, my mates have been asking me to create blogs for them as they had no idea how to do it. As we are friends, I didn't ask for payment except for the domain and used my cPanel to host this blog. I have been thinking of doing a site like wordpress.com where I would be using WordPress' multisite feature to set up a network of sites, anyone can create. This would be free of course however add-ons would be available and a sub-domain would be standard when registering.

I am planning on using a VPS to start with and as it won't be big at first, if ever, I am wanting to start with a small budget plan. Firstly, is a VPS suitable for this sort of thing and if so, what plan would you recommend starting off with? Disk Space wise and CPU wise. I can't give figures for this but lets say there were 20 blogs with an average of 10 posts each.

Secondly, it isn't cheap hosting this so I couldn't allow unlimited resources per blog. How much disk space would be good per blog hosted for free? I could sell more for those who need it. Correct me if i'm wrong but bandwidth shouldn't be limited per blog due to it being on one server, correct? Also, what add-ons should be sold for this service?

Lastly, do you know of any other alternatives to wordpress.com? If so, could you post a link as i'd like to check them out to see what I should offer. I am not expecting to be huge, more like a smaller network.

Thank you very much.

 

[Sam]

I was going to reply to this earlier but I wasn't near a computer.

I think this could be a good idea if managed correctly.

R.E. The hosting- I think you will be wanting a managed VPS solution. KnownHost and TMZVps are both good options (I've only had indirect experience with the first but they both have good reviews). Potentially you could go for an unmanaged VPS but you will need to know how to use SSH and do basic server management tasks (installing a firewall and security settings). I wouldn't recommend anything less than 2Gb ram. You will need to consider visualization platform (KVM, OpenVZ, Xen) and diskspace/ whether it is SSD or not.

You could limit diskspace and Ram/CPU. Most sites will use less than 1GB space. I think I had an autoblog in the region of 1000+ posts using around 1Gb. If you limit Ram/CPU wise then you will need to install CloudLinux (another added expense). Bandwidth can be limited per account...

You could also choose to earn some money off the blogs in which case you wouldn't have to limit the resources too much. An advert at the bottom of every page or an adsense revenue share would work nicely. xpl0iter, HolderHost's co-owner, created a mod for Adsense revenue sharing here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/revenue-sh ... uthorsrsp/.

I don't think anything is as well supported as Wordpress. Your only other option would be a custom blogging platform.

 

[Samalan]

I was going to reply to this earlier but I wasn't near a computer.

I think this could be a good idea if managed correctly.

R.E. The hosting- I think you will be wanting a managed VPS solution. KnownHost and TMZVps are both good options (I've only had indirect experience with the first but they both have good reviews). Potentially you could go for an unmanaged VPS but you will need to know how to use SSH and do basic server management tasks (installing a firewall and security settings). I wouldn't recommend anything less than 2Gb ram. You will need to consider visualization platform (KVM, OpenVZ, Xen) and diskspace/ whether it is SSD or not.

You could limit diskspace and Ram/CPU. Most sites will use less than 1GB space. I think I had an autoblog in the region of 1000+ posts using around 1Gb. If you limit Ram/CPU wise then you will need to install CloudLinux (another added expense). Bandwidth can be limited per account...

You could also choose to earn some money off the blogs in which case you wouldn't have to limit the resources too much. An advert at the bottom of every page or an adsense revenue share would work nicely. xpl0iter, HolderHost's co-owner, created a mod for Adsense revenue sharing here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/revenue-sh ... uthorsrsp/.

I don't think anything is as well supported as Wordpress. Your only other option would be a custom blogging platform.

Thanks for you response, very helpful. The hosting part, I will probably use Managed VPS Hosting.

There is a plugin for this on a WPMU (pay for membership monthly and get access to hundreds of plugins/themes) which allows me to have membership levels using edublogs.org as an example where each blog can have a certain amount of storage space, ad free blogs etc. So limiting disk space and such wouldn't really be that hard.<br /><br />-- 25 Nov 2013, 17:18 --<br /><br />Expanding on the last part about membership, I was thinking of having two upgrade options, a Gold and a Platinum plan. Gold would probably cost about £5/month and Platinum about £10/month. However i'm not sure what to really have for these two upgrades.

I am able to have premium themes for those who upgrade which would be a benefit. These themes wouldn't be ones you can get for free but I need to pay for or is part of a membership you have to pay for like WPMU.

Any other suggestions? I am not planning on rushing into this and will probably wait until after christmas so I can get a good plan and good discounts/more money etc.