BuddyPress.org

I’ve never used zenthemes.

But their Buddies theme page says:
“WordPress 3.3.1 & BuddyPress 1.5.3.1, bbPress 2 compatible”

So it’s out of date – should be at least WP 3.5 and BP 1.6

@dasped @dasped @companyjuice To avoid duplication of posts for themes which are already compatible with BuddyPress i.e, BuddyPress-ready themes, add the following line in your theme’s functions.php file

add_theme_support( ‘buddypress’ );

see https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/bp-theme-authors-make-sure-your-theme-registers-buddypress-support/

function restrict_admin(){
	//if Subscriber or low, kill WordPress execution and provide a message
	if ( ! current_user_can( 'edit_posts' ) ) {
		wp_die( __('You are not allowed to access this part of the site') );
	}
}
add_action( 'admin_init', 'restrict_admin', 1 );

Is this ok for you?

Try this plugin:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/remove-dashboard-access-for-non-admins/

@ubernaut I completely agree with you in that you must research the host to find out all you can about them. Believe it or not, there are amazing hosts out there at very reasonable prices. I found this out personally because a friend pointed me to webhostingtalk where they all congregate (and compete). I don’t want to mention my host because it will sound like I’m advertising but they are a reseller of liquidweb and I am a fanatical fan because they are out of this world for technical support above and beyond what a normal host would provide as well as the quality of their servers and the price is incredibly reasonable.

So I think on the whole we agree, do your research. Don’t go in with a preset bias or prejudice and you’ll find that most people’s preconceptions (as shown here in this thread) are wrong. Again, I’m speaking from experience here.

@bowromir hi Ben, if you’ll note I wrote that my assumption was that you used an affiliate link because you truly believed in wpengine. I hoped that was the case and I’m glad to be proven correct.

As for the rest, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’ve helped friends set up their wordpress blogs on shared hosting and they are getting better performance than some others on vps! go figure. and for a huge saving to boot!

My two cents here are for people to not be scared about doing things the right way, instead of paying for overpriced and overhyped service. If you are absolutely not technical, know that you can combine a great host with a couple of plugins (installed and tweaked by a freelancer) and then set it and forget it for a couple of years for great performance. Again, this is simply a fact from experience. Of course, if you want to pay out the wazoo for the same or inferior service, be my guest!

googling around you’ll find a lot of glowing recommendations for wpengine, with the not surprising affiliate link. but you’ll also find experiences like this one:

My experience with WPEngine (tl;dr, they sucked)

I had this working and upgraded wordpress and this seems to have broken this functionality – perhaps there is a bug to be investigated?

@synaptic as said before i would certainly agree that visitors is not the best way to gauge usage but it is the industry standard for this kind of hosting. These hosts are not simply slapping a few plugins on and calling it “wordpress hosting” at least not wp engine’s case. i know that people love to hate on dreamhost but their vps was fairly decent.

one thing i would say also is that you almost never know with the smaller hosting companies who you are actually buying your hosting from a lot of ‘hosts’ are simply reselling others’ services under their own brand. Oversell is common throughout the hosting world, always has been and just because your host maybe under capacity today doesn’t mean a thing if you outgrow them or they outgrow you. Fact of the matter is if you run buddypress then you are in the top 1% of sites in terms of server resources required to run your site, managed scalable wp hosting is a good solution for many situations, imo.

@bphelp it depends on who the host is, find a good one and you’ll be just fine (webhostingtalk forum is the best place to start looking for a quality host that is affordable). you can find shared hosting that is *better* quality than some VPS out there, you have to do your homework! shared, reseller, VPS, etc. these are all labels and you have to scratch to get at the real stuff underneath as well as the host’s reputation and service history

@ubernaut I reject completely the notion that counting visits is acceptable. This is hosting we are talking about! just because a few hosts have started calling themselves by a new tag ‘wordpress’ does not mean they are doing anything different or special. It is still just plain old hosting.  And as I said, you don’t need ‘staff’, you can get a freelancer to set up your site and plugins for $50 or so depending on the complexity. And once it is set, it is set. Instead of paying monthly, you pay once for that as it should be. And then you pay a reasonable fee for hosting monthly or annually.

ps dreamhost? seriously?!? c’mon! do yourself a favor and drop by the forum I mentioned. You’ll thank me for it. There are smaller and medium size hosting co. you’ve never heard of but they are the BEST and they have the rep to prove it (as well as great prices).

well his article is not really on this site he was just promoting the article here and i’ve seen some be far more blatantly self promoting in their posts. Anyway i would say that putting an affiliate link attached to a review/comparison certainly calls into question the objectivity of the author, generally speaking.

Regarding WP Engine i think you over simplifying you analysis of the situation, @synaptic. First off it is standard practice amongst the managed wordpress specialty hosts to charge by visitor count. I would be the first to agree that its probably not he bet way to count usage and lends itself to discrepancy but so far at least they have been more then reasonable with me at least about not holding my customers to the inflated numbers. Also they offer way more then just an optimized platform, all they do is wordpress granted if you are extremely experienced or well staffed you can achieve what they offer for probably less money but if you cannot devote that level of time or resources to your own infrastructure wp engine (as well as the other wp specialty hosts I’m sure) provides a real value. Our site runs quite bit faster and more securely on their platform then it did with a basically whole vps (2 in fact) on dreamhost.

back to @cannedbear ‘s question @ 25K per month you are really talking about 1000 per day or on average about 5 or 10 at any given time during a week day. Even at that level i would not personally recommend any shared hosting for buddypress and in fact i’d say at that level you probably wouldn’t want shared hosting for any wordpress site, remember site/page load time is one of the top factors now in determining your page rank in google search results (at least according to google).

I don’t mean to take the discussion on a tangent but am curious, what is buddypress.org’s policy regarding affiliate links? The article’s conclusion is an affiliate link which for now I’ll accept is because Ben truly does like WPE and that is why he’s recommending them, not the commissions. So I’d like this clarified by a moderator so we know where the board stands officially (@mercime ?)

Getting back into the discussion, WPengine is unnecessarily expensive.  Buddypress users can get the same (and more) functionality with a few free and very low priced plugins at a fraction of the cost.

For example, using proper speed optimization methods (minify, cache, etc.) as well as free backup plugins and CDNs (1 TB of transfer for $40/year) – I won’t mention names here but you can easily find out the most popular CDN for wordpress and that is its price.

Even if you are a novice, setting up a few plugins is easy. If it isn’t, you can get someone to set it up for you at fiverrr or similar freelancer sites (freelancer, elancer, odesk, etc.) for very cheap.

The net result is a rock solid buddypress+wordpress install that runs blazingly fast and has daily backup. And the price? a very small fraction of WPengine’s price. I have this on a shared hosting plan with a great quality host found at webhostingtalk and my cost is $14/month at 200 GB bandwidth/month.

PS I just noticed that WPengine prices their plans according to ‘visits’ instead of the hosting industry standard of GB or TB of data transferred per month. This is disingenuous at best and downright sleazy at worst. Yet another reason to stay awaaaay!