Support is key in my experience. Before you sign up to a 12 or 24-month contract, check out the host’s support policy and also search online to hear what their customers are saying. In my personal opinion, there’s nothing worse than an unaccommodating host.
I understand that, and thanks for your feedback. That’s why I mentioned about being in the UK as I’d need a UK based company I could call/email during UK business hours.
However, I’m nore concerned about bandwidth and dealing with the social network growth and what kind of hosting can cope with that.
Any advice?
@eskymo – if you have the money to burn get a basic vps somewhere and get it started.
my past experiences with “cloud hosting” did not work out – other hosts may differ.
If you have not even started I would not worry about bandwidth or the network growth – sure if you are going to run TV commercials saying join my social network and get free gold bars – then you probably want to worry about that..
I have a solid buddypress site running on a basic shared hosting environment (reseller package they call it I think – gives a little more resources)
I have one running on a VPS, and another on a dedicated server. Even if you get 10,000 members sharing pics and uploading vids I don’t think you will hit bandwidth and growth issues.
You can always copy your database and zip your files to a new host or larger plan at same host if you run into limits.. and of course also look at things to do that would minimize things (block bad robots indexing, cache plugins, etc)
Not sure why you would stick with looking in london hoping to get support on the phone during daytime hours – if I have a host that can’t answer me with support at 2am I move on (and have) to the next one.
With a reasonable host I think you could start at $10 a month.. if can afford get a VPS ~50 a month – dedicated shared resources – better if you are going to setup your BP to also be WP-MS (multi-site / multi-blog (giving users their own “tumblr” type blogs on top of the social networking stuff)
If you grow out of it – great – you can likely afford to go dedicated and look into tuning thing..
/random opinion \ thoughts
In my opinion, there’s no point using a sledge hammer to crack a nut so I wouldn’t go crazy to begin with. Hosts are generally able to scale with your needs. So, you could choose a basic VPS package to start and then monitor usage. If at any point you feel you need more horsepower then upgrade. If your host has good support, they’ll do this for you quite easily.
Thanks for the feedback guys – really useful. I’ve been using this company – http://4uhosting.co.uk/ – for over 10yrs. They provide a good reliable service, it’s not too expensive and their support is fabulous.
But I’ve heard the term GridHosting in relation to social networks and thought that was something I would need to host a social network.
I got in touch with 4UH and asked their advice and they emailed me this mornign with the following info:
“Hi Evie, Apologies for the delay. You can start off with a Basic plan for this project and we can upgrade it or move you to a plan with more resources at any time. We are working on our new cloud infrastructure which can grow a your site grows and this will be available towards the end of the year, so as you expand your site we will be able to respond accordingly. Obviously the cost would increase but as always we would make sure the price was competitive and give you good value.”
Their basic plan offers 5GB of web space, 50GB of monthly bandwidth
Let me know what you think.
Thanks
E
“Not sure why you would stick with looking in london hoping to get support on the phone during daytime hours – if I have a host that can’t answer me with support at 2am I move on (and have) to the next one.”
I work part-time and need to be able to contact during UK office hours so would prefer a UK basec company as I’ve had bad experiences having to deal with companies overseas as it doesn’t fit in with my working hours / family life.
Their basic plan offers 5GB of web space, 50GB of monthly bandwidth
This sounds reasonable. The key point here is they’ve said upgrading is easily done. That’s important because you’re able to scale as your website gains popularity.
Thanks for all your help guys – think I’ll stick with the hosting company I’m used to dealing with.
