Hosting?
So, just curious.... what are people hosting FluentCommunity on? Which companies? Hardware specs?
I use both xCloud and Rocket.net for hosting. And, I think I'm going to do a side-by-side test here, but it just SEEMS as if FluentCommunity isn't as fast as I would expect it to be on Rocket.net. And in fact, I do seem to be seeing more instances of admin panel sluggishness on Rocket these days.
Two different issues (admin & Fluent), but related. 😇
I gotta say, I'm pretty happy with Rocket overall. But, I always like to keep my ear to the ground.
I host on Hetzner AX52 dedicated server. Satisfied overall.
Cloudways not sure of settings
Kaneisha G. I run away from them.. Pricey, slow and they refused to pay me refund of my rest resources.
Kaneisha G. I liked Cloudways when I was still using them, but their tech stack is outdated compared to some. When I moved many of those sites to xCloud, everything improved.
David Risley I liked Cloudways because it was really user-friendly and easy to set up. But there all benefits ends.
This community here is pretty quick. What is this site running on?
David Risley it is just FC itself, no heavy site with plethora addons. But yea, it is running good.
Drive Zone Right. Yeah, a lot of my clients (plus my own site) run a bunch of plugins. Woo, FluentCRM, WP Fusion, etc. Some of my clients use Learndash, etc.
Hostinger and knownhost are perfectly good hosting providers. Hostinger has cloud hosting while knownhost offers VPN plans.
David Scurlock I’ve used knownhost for years, they are rock solid and the support is fantastic.
I use Vultr with xCloud. Works great but you just have to remember to enable PHP Opcache for the best performance.
Thomas Oates Yeah, I use xCloud, too, for about 40 sites. I've always kept the larger sites on Rocket, tho. Beginning to wonder if I should.
Hetzner with RunCloud here.
A lot of "fast" hosting is fast because of the caching they put in place. Admin and anywhere you are logged in (i.e. in FC) will not benefit from caching.
I'm pretty sure that Shahjahan Jewel mentioned this community (10,000+) runs on a $30/month setup during the last live. Or did I dream that? 🤣
Jonathan Gwyer Exactly. Rocket's hardware is supposed to be pretty good, but I wonder how the resources are distributed. They cache via Cloudflare, but that doesn't help a membership site much.
Jonathan Gwyer Hello, we are thinking about moving to Hetzner for dedicated server. Our currenr dedicated server is a bit expensive. Also we use Plesk and this is also quite expensive these days. Runcloud seems to be not so expensive. Is it leightweight and does it have wordpress management tools like WP toolkit has in Plesk?
Sam Jansen RunCloud has been very good for us.
Comparing their setup on the same server spec as a Cloudways install, we found it much quicker.
I don't use their RunCloud Hub plugin, but do make use of their WordPress Canvas set up a lot.
Sadly they no longer have a free trial, but $9 isn't much to try it out.
I keep wanting to try out xcloud - and if you use them to manage your own server they have a free plan - just need to find the time!
Jonathan Gwyer What about bulk plugin updates, is this supported in Runcloud?
Sam Jansen no, for that I use ManageWP - absolutely brilliant - I look after over 200 sites with ease.
Jonathan Gwyer 150 dollar a month for 100 websites? That is not so cheap.
Sam Jansen for plugin/update management, it's free. You only pay for the extras you need.
So I pay $150 to backup all 200 sites daily, but don't need all the other features for every site.
Jonathan Gwyer Ok yeah. For plugin updates it is fine. But for backups is quite expensive. I am looking to to save money compared to an all in one solution like Plesk. Everything is built in there for unlimited sites for around 55 euro a monrh.
Sam Jansen where are you backing up for that?
If your backup is with your host, it's not a real backup. If you cannot access your backups if your host goes down, then they are just restore points.
I do also have weekly backups running on RunCloud to my Google Drive, but it's nowhere near as convenient as ManageWP.
Jonathan Gwyer The backups are stored in de cloud from Plesk and we can access them. Also there is backupmanager that makes backups on an external server this one is from the company we are getting the dedicated server from.
Jonathan Gwyer Yep! Run away from them, Not secure host. Need to put big money to get a good firewall.
Willfred Niev Which host are you talking about?
Sam Jansen RC. I was hacked 3 time with them. Their response was get the Business plan.
Well, for sites running FluentCommunity with hundreds of members logged in at once, I prefer a scalable dedicated server or cluster setup with LiteSpeed, CloudLinux, and cPanel over managed platforms like Rocket or xCloud. Sharing this server with other WP-Site owners/clients make it profitable.
By "scalable," I mean we can allocate resources among our clients’ smaller sites and adjust CPU, PMEM, IO, EP, NPROC, etc. for each account based on real usage stats. So whenever our monitoring detects a spike on a small site, we can quickly migrate it (automatically via script) to a smaller cloud instance, freeing up resources for the sites that need them most.
Even though FluentCommunity uses Vue for the frontend, every user action still triggers API requests to the backend, so you need robust PHP and database performance.
A (managed) dedicated server or VPS (with root access) provides guaranteed resources and scalability, better PHP handling, and more control over server tuning, which is crucial when lots of users are active at the same time.
Shared or cloud platforms can bottleneck under that kind of load, but with a dedicated stack, performance stays consistent even during busy periods and traffic peaks.
But: for smaller sites or portals with fewer than 100 concurrently active members, I believe cloud or VPS hosting like RunCloud or xCloud will serve well. With LiteSpeed instead of Apache or NGINX installed here, I’d expect good performance even with up to 500 concurrently active users, provided the cloud/VPS specs are sufficient.
Shahjahan Jewel thankfully published a post with recommended specs last year:
We strongly recommend using a VPS or Cloud server and highly discourage using shared hosting for FluentCommunity. Actually, you should not use shared hosting for any WordPress websites:
CPU: 2 Cores or more, RAM: 4GB or more, Storage Type: NVMe SSD
However, he didn’t mention any thresholds regarding concurrently active users. So, everything I mentioned above is based on my personal experience and testing.
Since we've spoken a few months back, I've left Rocket.net because I started to experience performance issues (especially in admin) plus a few other things. I moved all of our brochure sites to BigScoots (managed). I'm also building out a FluentCommunity there - but too soon to know if the early community can run from the same managed plan. I do expect to move it as it grows, if not sooner.
Shahjahan Jewel So, what kind of server is this community running on? I really like how fast it is.
David Risley It should be xcloud
My communities run on WPmuDEV. So far, no issues
Anyone has an experience with SiteGround?