it’s more about how many people will be using your site at any given time if you have buddypress and especially if your theme is displaying buddypress info on most of your pages then you will almost certainly need vps to be happy with your load times.
Yes @ubernaut, lets say most of the users will be using the system at the same time. What are the recommended requirements regarding the HD size + Memory for example.
What is the recommended OS from your and others’ experience?
Thanks a lot
10k concurrent users is definitely a large number to be shooting for and correlates to something like a million visitors a day. in that case you would be running one of the most heavily trafficked site on the internet i would not be qualified to make hardware recommendations for anything like that but lets just say you would never want to start with that kind of overhead because you are talking many thousands of dollars a month just for bandwidth.
For a more realistic starting point i usually recommend some kind of linux vps. Usually memory and storage is not a concern with these kind of configurations but again this is nothing like a situation with 10k visitors on your site at any given time (buddypress or no).
doubt very much you will have 10,000 concurrent connections, it’s a huge amount and would require knowing how to fine tune idle servers maxservers, maxrequests per server etc.
If you really are expecting anything like that number you would be better off hiring a server engineer to scope out a server build and then spend a little time fine tuning it, as you are moving into very pro territory.
HD/storage is not an issue unless your users are uploading millions of files, but then you probably want to be using some form of cloud storage such as S2 buckets.
Memory likewise not really an issue in this respect although I would want a healthy 4GB with at least CPU 2 cores pref few more.
Real issue would more likely be Bandwidth you’ll need a lot or at least a big wide super interstate highway rather than data transfer otherwise things will slow to a crawl.
Server type is generally a given it’s Linux using Apache or Nginx, which most VPS boxes will have in way of rhel/centos or other distro.
Caching of any static files would be a must and need to be carefully managed checking all file headers and other approaches to server caching and compresion.
Other than that this question starts to veer off outside the scope of this forum really and is better asked of a dedicated forum for server issues.
