Hey. First, I didn't know where this thread should be, so mods please just move this if I posted in the wrong section. So... I'm planning to run a WordPress MU site and offer free blog hosting services to others. I would also give them the option to "upgrade" to a self-hosted blog (of course, that's how I'll earn -- hosting affiliate links!). I know there's WordPress.com, but I would allow users to serve their own ads (AFAIK WordPress.com doesn't). I also know that there's Blogspot but hey, I have the right to start my own service. Just a few questions: Have you tried running a blog hosting service? If yes, was it hard to manage? How much space/bandwidth is needed to run a blog hosting service? (I'm planning to host a few hundred blogs at first then expand later on and host... sky is the limit, I guess!) Would a shared hosting/reseller hosting package do? Or is a VPS/dedi recommended? Should I just get a reseller/shared at first then upgrade as I get more sign-ups? Any ideas on how to promote this type of site? Last question... Would people be interested in this service? I think most people prefer self-hosted blogs nowadays but there are still people who can't afford a domain+paid hosting. I also need your suggestions on what you want to see in a free blog host. Thanks so much for your time.
a VPS is recommended as you need to edit the apache config files to enable subdomain blogs in WP Mu... shared hosting is always a bad idea for this kinda project my $0.02 _
Definitely - if you don't use nofollow, it will be another tool people would want to use to submit free articles and get more backlinks. It's just going to take a lot of your time to block spammers and exploits.
I tried it out once but I found getting a lot of plugins to work very frustrating because lot of them didn't work as they should. So be prepared to waste some hours to tweaking everything, from plugins to templates.
Of course a dedicated server is recommended for any kind of hosting company. Its about reliability you know.
I'm thinking of using MU and I'm disappointed to hear that *so much* time is required for tweaking ... so even wordpress plug-ins don't work?
A request from a prospective user: Just to let you know, there are some people (me being among them ) who would be more than glad to use a free WP host with 2 features: 1. xml exports enabled 2. using own custom domain enabled Oh, and please, do not insert any intrusive ads (flash, popup..)
It's easy... takes about a few minutes to set up... as long as your domain allows wildcard subdomains meaning *.yourdomain.com in the dns zone file you should be ok.. Any plugin worth having is just a file copy to get installed. As far as dedicated, have a blog host with about 1000 users/blogs running on shared hosting with no problem... To customize it it may take a little time like anything.. but as far as getting it up and running it's a piece of cake.. Problems happen if you don't have wild card dns, mod rewrite or phpmail enabled.. if you have all of this as any good host would give you then it's a simple installation.
You should start with a share hosting as : Bluehost, Hostgator ... Later install wordpress script to run a blog.