Dreamhost all the way,
Been with them for 4 years now. Their servers are optimized to work with WordPress (and WPMU if you get a dedicated server), therefore Buddypress is a piece of cake. Their shared servers are really good actually, you get the best plans (seriously the stuff you can do is a lot more than the usual hosting package), and really good prices.
I may experience about 2-3 downtimes a year, which are usually for maintenance, seldom for hardware failure.
Plus, the guys at support really know what they’re doing and they can fix about anything really quickly, or even move you instantly to another server if it’s not working… and you dont have to do anything! 
Sounds like a deal, I am not sure though how much ram buddypress needs. Currently I am be hosted by HostGator with no problems and it seems they provide an easy way to scale up and reasonable prices. But yea, it would be great to know how much ram a buddypress site would need and maybe recommended bandwidth.
Thanks, I am thinking about using DreamHost.
check out icdsoft.com and bluehost.com. i am a college professor and teach web design courses…those are the two i recommend to my students after much research.
Bluehost is reliable and affordable.
Media Temple are not bad , have one of their Dedicated virtual servers, possibly a bit pricier than the others, but excellent fast support, very good KB, good active forum, server performs well has plenty of bandwidth, memory and disk space, plesk panel plus licences not that I like control panels that much. Full SSH root access, do what you like with the server etc.
As for memory required to run something like WPMU and Buddypress it really all depends on how busy the site is we have on this particular server 1.5GB which is plenty. WP/BP should run fairly well in less, min I would want though is 512MB. More important I would have thought is having a full set of resources to dedicate to the site so wouldn’t consider running on any form of shared hosting only VPS or Dedicated especially when things start to get busy.
All of the hosts mentioned are good and all I think are recommended on wordpress.org so should be fairly safe whichever you choose.
If you are running buddypress with wordpress single version (not wpmu), then dreamhost, hostgator, and others should be fine.
But if you intend to host blogs or use buddypress with wpmu, then those shared servers won’t be capable of your applications. I currently use wpmu/buddypress on Media Temple grid server.
Good point shared hosting won’t allow WPMU to run probably due to the requirement to be able to create sub domains at will.
Not sure even with single WP I would want to run a busy buddyPress site on shared hosting?
http://buddygrid.net is a specialized BP host in France with fair prices and a great BP fan as CEO…
Awesome suggestions guys, thanks. I am using wpmu and I made it so users cannot create blogs, that should help things bandwidth and ram wise. I will start off with 384 MB ram and gain some users, then I will scale up from there. Should be enough.
This is somewhat like asking someone for a good chiropractor… in the immortal words of George Costanza… “Oh yeah, everybody’s guy is the best” LOL.
My “guy”? In Canada… I use iWeb for dedicated hosting. Core 2 Duo w/ 1GB and 1.5T traffic is $99/mo. And they run clearance deals all the time.
MediaTemple is the best choice for wordpress related hosting needs it also suits for Buddypress also
If you are not afford thier package then you may go for HostGator , i found it the best one after mediatemple for Buddypress hosting
If you know how to set up and configure a server, then I’d recommend Slicehost.
@DJPaul – I also though about Slicehost as Buddypress is a bit slow on hostgator (single blog). What do you need to configure on Slicehost to move on? Is Apache, PHP, MySQL out of the box? Do you have to be PRO to manage such server to protect your site from hackers and stuff like that? I have experience in managing Linux servers but very basic.
You an download a LAMP stack that will install Apache, MySQL and PHP quite easily (Linux is the L of that acronmym). Bitnami.org offers this. I’m sure there are probably others.
I use http://www.bigwetfish.co.uk/.
Excellent support and inexpensive.
“We are bigwetfish and we love what we do. We pride ourselves in taking a innovative and forward thinking approach to web hosting in everything that we do. Customer relationships are the key in building our community and we want you to be a part of that. All our hosting plans include:”
* * PHP5 & MySQL
* * Web based control panel
* * Fantastico including WordPress
* * Email (Pop3 and webmail)
* * SSL, FTP, Stats
We’re running BP on a shared server at Network Solutions and I am experiencing some serious delays for logged in users (visitor pages are cached and are fine). If you visit http://www.iyso.net as a visitor and then log in as a member, you’ll see a striking difference in page load times. We’ll be moving to a dedicated server shortly.
