CUNY Academic Commons

Sorry, should have been hosting requirements, not recommendations. Agree we shouldn't be in the business of recommending hosts.

I do think we should raise this from the FAQ to part of the installation guide or somewhere else visible in the documentation. Also think we should give some advice concerning scale -- how the requirements for the system may change as more people use it.

Perhaps we could start by collecting existing resources on how to scale WordPress

Good idea, though I think we may want to give people some rough guidelines that will help them determine which plans to buy. We might take a look, for instance, at some sample plans from a popular hosting site like Bluehost and just indicate that, say, most sites will be fine with X level of storage/bandwidth/etc.

Just to clarify: I'm not saying that we should recommend Bluehost or use their info directly, just that we can use their basic packages as a way of creating rough guidance for people to use as they look for plans.

OK, but I don't have that expertise. Scott, perhaps you could do some research to see if others have developed rough guidelines along the lines of what Matt wants.

I did some preliminary research - it seems like there are Dedicated Virtual servers DV (at places like MediaTemple, $50/month) and Virtual Private Servers (Godaddy, DailyRazor, etc. - $40-60/month). Each seems to have memory qualifications (256 MB, 512 MB), Bandwidth (1 TB/month, etc.), and disk space (some surprisingly small - i.e. 25 GB).

And then there are the common, low resource, shared plans that I think won't really scale - but will work for testing - I have a BlueHost account and am running CBOX to test - and it is fine, for just me, on a single site install.

And another variable (besides number of members) is whether or not multi-site is going to be used - which I think would be a big memory concern (and disk space concern ??). And backup concerns, I guess.

So there seem to be some tradeoffs - I would think that maybe a DV plan like Media Temple's - 512 MB, 1 TB bandwidth, 25 GB disk space for $50.00/month - might be adequate - but I am not that sure.

I also read somewhere on the BuddyPress site that people seemed to like them. Not that we really want to advertise for any specific company. More likely we need to describe the attributes of a server that will do the job. (And of course, it needs to run Linux, etc.)

Maybe Andre could point us in the right direction??

Thanks, Scott. André, any comments?

Great update, Scott -- many thanks. Can you make a few additional edits, please?

"As we briefly noted in one of our documentation pages:" --> please add link

"good community discussions on Help & Support" ---> change to Help and Support Forums, and please add link

"Another thread entitled “Need Advise on Server Specs” ---> since the title of the thread contains a typo, please remove the actual title and just say "Another thread focused on specifications...." Please make "Another thread" a link to the actual thread

"Another response" --> please link to actual response

"Here’s another:" --> please link to actual response

"Join one of the threads" --> please link to the forums

otherwise, this is great. thank you!

excellent -- thank you, Scott.