July 29th, 2009
(Sorry for the puntastic title on today’s entry.) I’ve been considering moving to a new web hosting company so I can take advantage of some of the features of WordPress MU. I really like my current web host. But I would have to upgrade to a new hosting plan in order to run WordPress MU. And because of the fact that our network of sites serves up about 50 GB worth of data per month (primarily in the form of audio and video podcast files), the cost of this new plan would be too high. After doing some research, I found a hosting plan that would give me a complimentary WordPress MU installation along with enough storage and bandwidth to keep our sites running into the foreseeable future. And the price per month isn’t much more than what we’re paying now.
The main reasons I want to move over to WordPress MU from our current setup (a collection of standalone WordPress installations) is because I’d like to streamline the upgrade process for our different sites. As it is now, any time a new version of WordPress is released, I have to separately log in to ten different sites and run ten different upgrades. It can be tedious and annoying. I’d also like to make use of WordPress MU’s Sitewide Tags plugin as it would allow for tags to be (sort of) aggregated across all of our sites. And that’s just cool.
I’ll be contemplating this potential move over the next few days. If I do decide to go ahead with it (and I probably will), there won’t be any major changes for anyone who’s following any of our sites. Other than that they may go down for a day or so. But, if you’re subscribed to any of our RSS feeds, or if you’ve got any of our sites bookmarked, you’ll still be able to rely on those subscriptions and bookmarks after the move is completed.
Now, I have to get back to that research.
July 31st, 2009 at 12:12 am
Are you hosting your own audio files now? I assumed you had some podcast site hosting them.
I’m using the free Gcast service to host the files for a friend’s podcast.
What are the benefits of WordPress MU?
July 31st, 2009 at 7:05 pm
We’re hosting all of our own media files, Ken. And somehow, DreamHost lets us do that for a mere $10.00/month. And if we moved up to DreamHost’s dedicated server account (a requirement to host WPMU with them), we’d be charged for hosting and (I think?) CPU usage. And serving up approximately 50 GB/month is gonna use a lot of CPU. And in turn, cost us a lot of cash. WPwebhost’s plan is only $16.00/month, and looks to have all of the features we need to keep things running after an upgrade to WPMU.
With WPMU, all of our sites would live under one “WordPress core,” for lack of a better term. So, things like upgrades would only have to be done once. It may also be possible to do things like multi-site tags and blogrolls, which would also save some time, and might help to generate traffic in between sites. So, basically, it’d save me some administrative time, and it might give us some cool new features for our sites. But overall, there’s nothing in WPMU that’s really useful unless you’re running more than one site. I think the rule of thumb is, if you’re running more than five sites, then you might want to consider WPMU.
August 1st, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Interesting post. I hope everything transfers smoothly.
August 1st, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Thanks for the update, Shawno. So, essentially, you’re getting three months of file hosting for the price of dinner at California Pizza Kitchen.
Sounds like a deal!
September 14th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
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