Host Suggestions, please

Be wary of some of the managed WP hosts out there. While they are great for scaling vertically ie. millions of page views / month, they often have serious issues scaling horizontally. Our team currently manages a cluster of 500+ sites on 1 multisite install with a premium managed hosting company, and we have been having a lot of issues. We plan on moving to a cloud hosted solution fairly soon.

I can tell you that any sort of grid hosting solution will not be enough for 300 sites. However; if your sites are built well (ie. no errors, no heavy database queries, functions only running when they need to be, using a CDN) you can really get away with a pretty inexpensive rock solid solution. For you, I would definitely recommend a cloud VPS solution that allows you to scale your resources as you add sites to your network.

Whatever you do, do your research. Talk to people, ask them if they have experience hosting networks of that size, and if their solution is capable of scaling horizontally.

Thanks Ryan, great intel. Would you suggest using a host in another country, say America (as I’m basing my sites here in the UK?) It would seem to be cheaper, but not sure if latency with data centers is a big issue?

Also, when you say “inexpensive”, can you please give me an idea of what you mean? Because I have been quoted everything from $11.99 per month to $249.99 per month. I have no real idea of what to expect.

Thanks!

Ideally your host should be located closest to wherever most of your visitors will be coming from. That combined with a CDN would make for some pretty solid performance.

The price of hosting is going to vary a lot depending on support, features & specs. I’m not sure what kind of bandwidth / storage you would need, so it’s tough to tell. I can tell you that grid hosting will not work for you. I would definitely put it on a cloud VPS that you could bump the specs up on as the network grows, and then you won’t have to worry about moving the network at any point.

The thing that is really going to start getting costly for you is the features & support. We are currently paying 6k+ for a dedicated box at a managed WP hosting company. Most of that money is really going to support. We could get a box with the same specs for about 1.5k if it wasn’t managed.

If you are looking to keep the price down, I would look into some unmanaged solutions such as AWS or digital ocean Just be warned that these solutions will require a lot more work on your part, and some more intimate knowledge of server configurations. Though if you are looking to spend under 250/month I don’t really see another way.

Is that 6k per month? What can you recommend for managed hosting options? Again, I seem to see prices that are a lot lower than what you’re quoting… but again, I have no idea what I’m looking for.

Without sounding too foolish, I’m basically just looking for somewhere for the site to sit. I’m not too overly aware of things I would need to change on the server… so I really don’t know what I need in the way of server options.

Per the Forum welcome, we close topics like this due to the amount of spam that they attract. The WordPress team has provided a list of a few recommended hosting providers. For more details and other recommendations, please search through the forums or via Google (or your preferred search engine).

Note: By closing this post I neither support nor condemn the use of the servers listed on the www.remarpro.com official hosting page, and encourage you to search around.