Hell everyone. I have been running Joomla websites for many years on a Dreamhost shared-hosting account. My most resource-intensive site is a picture gallery and event listing website that gets around 700-1000 visitors every day. So far it has been fine. It was running slow until my host upgraded me to one of their new, beefier servers. But I am wondering if anybody has experience running a successful community website using Joomla. I have a new idea for a community that has the potential to quickly grow to over 1000 users and I believe it will continue to grow at a fast pace. I want something similar to myspace. Fully-customizable profiles, picture galleries, bulletins, the whole shabazz. I am mostly concerned about the performance of a community running on Joomla. I don't want the site to get bogged down after it grows into a huge community. Should I stick with a Joomla-based community or just go with some sort of community script altogether?
I would go with Joomla (jomsocial), Dolphin or ELGG. Pligg is maybe also good, but I never worked with this. Anyway, do not buy a script from ebay or some other cheap scripts, these are all not worth the money. Performance: If your community get more than 10000 visits each month you should definitely move to a vserver or dedicated server, maybe managed if you do not know anything about linux
I run a fairly large community using Joomla and community builder, just click the site in my signature to take a look at it. It currently has a little over 100,000 registered members. Your shared hosting just isn't going to cut it if you get much traffic, especially after you start adding extensions. I'm maxing out my dedicated server with what I have as it is with about 4,000 uniques per day. You really need dedicated resources for a dynamic site like your talking about.
Good suggestions from both posters. I would also recommend JomSocial because it is an excellent community component that takes advantage of all of Joomla's robust admin functionality. I would also suggest, as sfraise did, that you consider dedicated servers before you build a site that you have big plans for. The more folks interact inside the community, the more hits your server will get and it will bog down to a crawl fast and kill the user experience. The good news is that if you are used to using Joomla, the building and maintaining JomSocial will come pretty easy.