Just like most plugins, BePro Listings will work on any server. However, if your goal is to provide a high availability listings experience to your customer, you must have the proper setup. All servers have a limit on performance. You need the server that can support the amount of customers you expect and the complexity of your project. This post covers recommendations for facilitating a great BePro Listings experience for your visitors
RECOMMENDATIONS
You don’t need all listed statistics; However, they would provide the best foundation for success. Some users will get a lot of traffic and need more, others will get very little traffic and use less
– VPS or dedicated hosting
– 256MB ram or higher
– Curl or File_get_contents turned on (google maps)
– SSL (payments)
– caching and/or content deliver network (cdn)
EFFICIENCY
BePro Listings is very efficient. Where possible, we break away from the wordpress infrastructure, using our own database tables and functions. We pay special attention to the performance of our search architecture, which makes it possible to run so many different types of listing sites with the plugin. In fact, BePro Listings uses wordpress only for the features you have grown to expect from it including
– title
– images
– custom taxonomies
– custom post types
We do not store any other searchable information in wordpress as discussed in this article. In short, wordpress has performance limitations when it comes to searching and comparing values it stores. Since BePro Listings is focused on storing specific information, its approach is much faster in, storing, retrieving and comparing information. Where wordpress would use 3 tables to reference one value, we store multiple values in 1 table. Under high volume, its easy to see that BePro Listings will perform well.
USER EXPERIENCE
If your server is timing out with just wordpress installed, you can anticipate that it will perform worse with multiple plugins installed on top of it. There are statistics which state users will leave your website if it does not load within a few seconds. We know that users will leave if their search results take too long to process
A slow experience makes a visitor typically want to move on. Every rule has an exception and rare information will obviously keep an interested visitor on your website. However, chances are that you are competing against others and need to keep your customer engaged. This is something you should plan to start with the first customer, rather than hoping to grow investment money via a low quality experience. Our experience shows that this approach typically does not work. Customers should have a fast experience from day one, with you upgrading servers to retain that standard.
SERVERS
Through your personal experience using computers, its obvious they are not all built the same. Some computers are faster than others. Servers are no different, since they are computers with dedicated IP’s and special web hosting software
If you purchased shared hosting, congratulations on your first step into web hosting. You have selected the cheapest option you could find to get online and probably hope to out perform your competitors. In reality, your shared hosting is also being used by hundreds of other customers with their own websites. This also means that you are sharing the same IP address. This provides the following scenario
– intermittent sluggishness or inability to access the website during peak hours
– API’s that track by IP will assume the other server users are you and apply penalties e.g. google maps
– Inability to setup a full professional ssl protection
– Security intrusions for one user can easily affect all other users on that shared server
In short, you get what you pay for. There is a reason you hear major companies spend lots of money on servers. You have heard of servers crashing from too much traffic, so you know there is a limit somewhere. You don’t have to start at the most expensive server setup, but the cheapest option is typically not useful beyond a simple blog or html website.
CONCLUSION
Test BePro Listings on any server. When ready to attract and support thousands of visitors, get the correct server for your needs. Just because wordpress works on your server, doesn’t mean all of its custom addons will work when thousands of users start hitting your websites. Set yourself up for success by purchasing a server setup which can support your expectations