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Server Recommendations

Hosting a BuddyBoss site differs significantly from hosting a blog or a marketing site.

BuddyBoss is a community platform that allows users to do all kinds of things within it, such as posting in the activity feed, reading notifications, sending messages, and a lot more. When you have several concurrent users online simultaneously, perform all these activities, host a web server and database are hit hard, and that’s just what we do.

Unlike your typical WordPress marketing site or blog, you can’t just cache all the pages of a dynamic site. Every user has a personalized experience in dynamic websites and apps, and page caching doesn’t work well for this use case.

In addition, many WordPress hosting providers have been blocking API requests and limiting AJAX calls, which are critical for running Headless WordPress, our approach for the BuddyBoss App. We’ve experienced this with various hosts when running the BuddyBoss App.

All of this led to us wanting to create our own easy-to-use solution that solves all of these issues and can handle the concurrent users of a community, eLearning platform, and other types of dynamic WordPress-powered platforms while providing the highest performance, speed, and security. From now on, you will learn how to host your own website painlessly.

Watch the podcast episode to learn more about hosting your BuddyBoss site or app, the factors affecting the performance, and how we solved this with Rapyd.

These are the minimum server requirements recommended for sites running BuddyBoss smoothly and with all functionality working as intended.

Required Server Software Packages

  • PHP version 7.3 or greater – 7.3 or greater for optimal performance
  • MySQL version 5.6 or greater OR MariaDB version 10.1 or greater
  • WordPress version 4.9.1 or greater – We recommend installing WordPress manually and NOT via a hosting provider self-install (e.g. fantastico, softalicious, etc.)
  • Apache Module mod_rewrite
  • PHP GD or imagick modules – WordPress will fail to create images and will NOT show an error
  • AllowOverride should be set to All in folders where .htaccess is located

Before Installing We Recommend

  • Backing up your database and files
  • VPS Hosting or better – Social communities increase server resource load with each concurrently logged in user. Shared hosting will provide a very slow experience.

Questions?

We're always happy to help with questions you might have! Search our documentation, contact support, or connect with our sales team.