I went to a Wordpress meetup at Citizen space on Jan 22nd and shared my thoughts on using Wordpress MU and Buddypress to develop a social network. Everyone thought this was a bad idea.

Here are the reasons why:

Wordpress MU is hard to scale and is a space fiend

Wordpress sets up 9 tables per user. So even if your Wordpress MU site has only 4 users, that is 36 tables in the backend. Most of us set up proof of concept sites on shared hosting to keep costs low. But using Wordpress MU, the POC won’t even be able handle the initial beta users. You will crash way before you will know if your business concept should be delivered further.

Large user backend means you have less space for other content

In the current social network space, monetizing video and audio content is a compelling value proposition to users. WP MU is not providing any space for storing video and audio content. You can store your video at outside sites like youtube and google video, but they suffer from poor quality and do not provide paid restricted access to your social network users. Solution

Ning. Here’s why:

• doesn’t have the scaling issue. By default Ning comes with 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. According to them this is approximately 5,000 photos or 500 videos. You can purchase additional units of 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth for $9.95 per unit per month.
• has a self-hosted service that would allow me to use my own domain for $4.95 a month
• may not be affected by the limitation of the Ning ID (which I mentioned in my last post) in a few months. They have already allow several opensocial applications. May be OpenAuth is on its way next.

For more info on Ning Premium services go here.

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