Community Support Forums

Hi all - I have been using S2member primarily as a tool to host online psychotherapy conferences. Therapists pay a fee for access to audio presentations related to particular topics. For example, how to treat depression. They pay one-time for lifetime access to the presentations.

My next conference has the support of an international organization and it is entirely possible that I might get in excess of 1000 enrollments. My current maximum is about 220 attending one conference. My next conference will also have over 40 presenters each with an mp3 of an hours length.

Here's my question: Will a shared hosting environment, such as BlueHost "Pro" be enough? Are there additional factors or capabilities that I need to consider for such a large conference. Any ideas?

Thanks! - Ryan

You will exceed the maximum number of mySQL connections pretty quickly with that many users, particularly if many of them are logging it at once. You should probably host the audio files in Amazon S3 or MaxCDN to offload that from your server regardless of what you end up doing for hosting. I have over 3000 members running on a VPS, but am also making heavy use of caching on CDN.

Any advice for scaling WordPress itself would be applicable to s2Member. I agree with scripteralex in that you should look into hosting all your media files on Amazon S3.

Also, I personally wouldn't feel comfortable running a site that large on a shared hosting account. You're very much at the mercy of your web host if the load increases. They might suspend your account arbitrarily to protect other accounts on that server.

A VPS account or a dedicated server are your best bet.