BuddyBoss Hosting: What’s The Hosting For A Buddyboss Membership Site
I have set up many membership sites using the BuddyBoss theme and the BuddyBoss platform. After all, in the past I called it perhaps the perfect membership site theme.
The full Buddyboss package has the full community platform as well as the theme. Much of the time, these site are running an LMS such as Learndash. Some of the sites I’ve set up even run their CRM in-house using FluentCRM and using WP Fusion to control member permissions. And processing orders through something like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.
Obviously, this kind of setup needs good, solid web hosting. The question is…
What KIND of web hosting?
Let me try to answer you in plain English.
In This Post…- BuddyBoss Versus Other Themes
- Running BuddyBoss On Typical Shared Web Hosting?
- Using A Virtual Private Server (VPS) For Your BuddyBoss Site
- Hosting Directly From BuddyBoss – with Rapyd
- Recommendations For BuddyBoss Hosting Performance
- Final Thoughts on BuddyBoss Hosting
A BuddyBoss site with the community features turned on places a higher demand on the web server than a typical blog theme or course-centric membership site. The BuddyBoss server requirements are therefore higher than normal.
See, every member who is logged in needs to see different things. And that includes pulling community activity from the database such as news feed updates, group updates, forum activity, private messages, etc.
Essentially, the more functions of the BuddyBoss platform that you turn on, the higher the demand. But, even just having BuddyBoss active (with many of the functions disabled) still requires higher server requirements. And the more users using the platform at the same time, the higher the requirements.
A BuddyBoss site cannot use typical web caching. Since every member needs to see different content, it cannot be cached in the traditional way.
With that in mind…
Running BuddyBoss On Typical Shared Web Hosting?
I’ve seen some blogs out there saying that you can run BuddyBoss nicely on shared hosting accounts from the likes of Siteground, WPEngine, Bluehost, etc. To be blunt, much of the time their recommendations are not based on experience, but instead their affiliate commissions.
Will it work as Buddyboss hosting? Well…. yes, most likely. However, you may quickly run into issues.
The performance promises of some of those shared hosting companies depends very much on strong caching. And since a BuddyBoss site is more of a dynamic web application than a traditional blog, you just can’t run caching like that. So, you need to run those hosting accounts much more “raw” without some of the speed optimizations turned on. And resources will be much more limited.
To be clear, I would never in a million years recommend you try to host your BuddyBoss site on something like Bluehost, Godaddy, or any of the usual cheap web hosts. Even if you are able to get the thing running on these hosts, it won’t take much traffic to bring the site to it’s knees.
Siteground is a popular shared web host and they are indeed a good company. Depending on the number of users you expect to use your site at the same time, it is quite possible your site will run fine on Siteground. I would recommend the GrowBig account or higher. Siteground’s hosting runs on Google Cloud and that does give it an advantage over some other hosts.
Overall, however, any web host that hooks you in using incredibly cheap pre-paid pricing like $2.99/month or something similar is simply not a host I would trust with a BuddyBoss site. It isn’t likely to run well.
When you move up to fully managed WordPress hosting, things get better. This would include hosts such as WP Engine, Kinsta, or my favorite – Rocket Hosting.
Managed WordPress hosting is shared hosting typically, but it is common for them to use something like Google Cloud as the internal infrastructure. This is why you often see these hosts have disk and bandwidth quotas. Despite the appearance of those limitations, however, these hosts are usually going to give you more horsepower for a BuddyBoss site than typical shared hosting.
My personal preference here would be Rocket Hosting. See my review of Rocket here. I also host my Concierge clients on Rocket for a reason.
Using A Virtual Private Server (VPS) For Your BuddyBoss SiteOne of the potential problems with most shared web hosts is that they don’t provide very much flexibility and control over your setup. They set up their hosting offer a certain way and you just use it. You cannot necessarily change anything.
With a virtual private server, you have more flexibility because the resources dedicated to your site are dedicated to your site only. Not only that, if you need to tweak certain things and do things a little bit differently, you’re generally not going to be blocked from doing so.
While you could get a “bare metal” VPS server directly through Digital Ocean or Vultr, you would be completely on your own to set up that server and manage it. It is incredibly geeky and not for the faint of heart. For that reason, I recommend that you use a virtual private server through a company that offers a web panel for it. This includes companies like:
When you select a VPS server, I would recommend absolutely no less than 2GB of server memory. Keep in mind, that’s bare minimum. You’d be far better off moving up to 4GB or 8GB of memory for a BuddyBoss site. Typically, moving up to these memory levels also adds more CPU cores to your server which will help.
I would also recommend you go with the Premium option on Digital Ocean or the High-Frequency option on Vultr. These servers offer faster read/write speeds on the storage and you’re going to want that for a BuddyBoss site due to the amount of database activity which is typical.
Pros of VPS Hosting- Usually offers more horsepower for the money
- More control over the server settings, allowing you to better tweak things for BuddyBoss
- Resources not shared with other people
- Requires a bit more technical know-how. With greater power comes greater responsibility.
