Questions about having a community for multiple years

Samuel Peiffer  having posts in fCommunity is similar to let's say WP comments - it's all about a storing text value in your db - more text/posts/comments = bigger db. I am simplifying but I believe you get the idea.

Similar case is with attachments (files are stored in your hosting folder not in your db unless you think of links to those files).

Note: If you delete a post or an attachment you will free up the space - no matter if it's WP community or SaaS community.

If you think that you will have a lot of attachments then you need more storage either on your hosting or somewhere else. SaaS solution probably will also charge you for the storage too - directly or indirectly and they might have some other pricing level factors so its not a free or cheap anyway.

Simple calculation/example: if a single post/comment size would be on average 10KB (maybe we can get some real size number from this community although it might not be relevant for our community) then with 1,000,000 entried (post/comments/chats) you will need 10GB DB storage and also if a single attachment/file size would be on average 100kb then with 1,000,000 attachments you need 100GB server space storage or R2/S3 etc. Once you have your estimation you can compare WP on permises vs SaaS pricing and make a long term decision (personally I wouldnt worry about +3 years old perspective too much - who knows if WP or our Planet will exist then).

Note: you can configure to offload your fCommunity attachments/files with R2 or S3 and I am not sure why you would like to offload your db content (post/comments) somewhere else for many reasons.

Attachment offload is already possible in Pro.

Note: for video files you should use video hosting like: bunny.net for obvious technical reasons.

At the end you might ask yourself a question why to use WP at all since there are ready out of the box solutions. There is no simple answer to that but I am pretty sure you know that already.

You might be interested in the below posts:

• https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/recommended-server-configuration-for-fluentcommunity
• https://github.com/WPManageNinja/fluent-community-docs/blob/master/benchmark.md
• https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/the-technical-design-of-fluentcommunity-plugin-some-confusions-cleared

Note: The question about having community on WP vs SaaS is a strategic decision in general like with any other solution and it all depends.

Example: you can run your own mail server and manage your emails but it is not the best option in many cases.

If you want to drink milk you don't need to own a dairy place.

So in general.. if you don't want to manage your community storage and/or you dont want to take care about some updates and/or you accept someone else pricing and rules etc then use SaaS so you can focus on managing your community rather then taking care of some technical aspects, storage, security etc.

Ps. Circle storage limits attached just in case

This is a great post. I have been comparing FC to Kajabi as well. They do not seem to have a storage quota like Circle. They limit based on file size and customers. I am a bit nervous that my fluent community will consume loads of storage pushing my costs closer to Kajabi. Does anyone have any usage data on an active community?