TommyCarey
Level X3
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I was recently putting together a multivendor marketplace for physical products in a small niche then transferred my site over to WPMU DEV hosting because I started using their plugins and liked them. I've been on their plugin free trial plan for about a week now and like it, so I swapped over to their hosting because they said you could host three websites with them at no additional charge if you were a premium member, which I technically was lol.
Their hosting was in Beta and recently went live, so I thought I'd check it out since my website was on Wordpress and that's what WPMU DEV specializes in.
Transferring My Website
There are many ways to do this, like using all in one transfer for Wordpress, but WPMU DEV has a pretty fancy plugin called Shipper that will do this for you rather quickly if you have a small site. Now, my website wasn't exactly small so it took a couple of hours, but it was worth the wait lol.
There was a "pre-launch" checklist that the Shipper plugin went over and then showed me some things it may have troubles with. There are three sorts of notifications with this, and they are a Green, Yellow, or Red notification. Green meaning everything is good to ship, Yellow meaning some files could be bothersome, and Red meaning there are files that the Shipper plugin knows will be a problem. The Shipper plugin will still migrate your entire website if you have a couple of yellow notifications, but it won't start anything if you have something showing up in red. I was lucky and had mostly green notifications with only two yellows, so it was time to ship!
All I do after the pre-launch is click a button, and everything starts to migrate.
*Note* You will need to set up a staging site on WPMU DEV before shipping. It will be something like yoursite.wpmudev.host and you can attach your domain to it after you have migrated all your pages. Both your current website and the staging site will need the shipper plugin installed and activated for this to work.
After around an hour or two, I had everything transferred over to wpmudev.host, and I was ready to rock! I checked to see if anything was broken, tweaked, missing, etc. and it all seemed to be just fine 
Don't Upgrade Right Away
When I transferred my website, I knew I still had some stuff to do, and that's why I didn't upgrade right away. If your site is 100% finished, then you can upgrade your hosting easily by choosing which plan you want and paying for it.
The nice thing about this is that you get to host three websites for free if you're a premium member like I was, and that means you technically have a $30 credit for upgrading your plan. I was on a bronze/free hosting plan that was on a decent server, but I know I'll need something more prominent when the traffic starts flowing, so I went to upgrade to Silver and saw I had $30 in credit. I decided to upgrade to their Gold package, which is normally $50 a month, but I'm now paying just $20 a month to be on a dedicated server where I can get around 250,000 people a month lol.
I would suggest becoming a premium member because you get access to all the plugins. I will also recommend becoming a premium member because you will get a $30 credit towards your hosting each month You could upgrade to Silver and still have like $5 or $10 credit each month lol.
Server Speeds
When I was on NameCheap I had configured and optimized my website as much as possible with the WPMU DEV plugins and got my site to load in 8.6 seconds, which isn't the best in the world but I have a big website that has a lot of images, so I was gonna have to deal with it. When I switched over to WPMU DEV, which gives me dedicated resources, I noticed my load times went from 8.6s to around 3 seconds, and we all know that's pretty amazing for any ecommerce marketplace let alone a website at all lol.
Yes, my multi-vendor eCommerce marketplace loads in 3 seconds after I swapped hosting and optimized it. I still haven't used some of the features on the optimization plugins so I'm thinking I can get it down to 2.5 seconds or even 2 seconds lol.
The Downside
I did a load of research before I switched my hosting because I didn't want to have to switch back to NameCheap if WPMU DEV didn't pan out. I love everything they offer except one thing that might not be a big deal; it's just a little extra work on my end.
They don't offer email access.
This means you need to set up a 3rd party email service provider to access [email protected]
It's a little annoying, but I've found a few services I like, and they're not expensive at all. The one I wanted is around $30 for the year, and it's a large mailbox. I might set up two smaller mailboxes that are each $20 a year, but I'm not sure just yet.
In the end,
I would highly suggest checking out WPMU DEV hosting if you have a WordPress website that you want to put on an excellent sized server and don't really know what you're doing. I'm horrible when it comes to programming, design, and server management which is why I like WPMU DEV. I don't have to worry about much, I simply click buttons, and everything is configures, and their support seems to be top notch so far
Thanks for reading!
- Tommy
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey
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I've heard good things about SiteGround, and I was going to switch to them, but I decided to give out WPMUDEV a try since I had their plugins and I was really surprised.
My site is super optimized, fast, and everything really works well together :D
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TommyCarey
I was having a problem with my domain propagating, but it was because I messed something up in the DNS records lol
The really nice thing about this is that you get to host 3 sites for free, each on $10 hosting plans, but you still get dedicated resources for each site. This means you're not on a shared hosting plan and have to worry about someone else buying 10,000,000 visitors a day and flooding the server you're sharing, which will slow your website. If your site is slowing down, it's either because you messed something up or the server itself is not doing well lol.
As for the only downside, not being able to create email addresses, I've found Improv.mx and plan on trying them out. I'll have to edit my records, which takes a minute or two, but I should be able to set up a support@, social@, MyName@, NoReply@, and any other email I plan on using. It's free to use this service and they have a premium $9 a month plan but that's not really needed lol. If everything goes well with this email forwarding service I will definitely write up a review on them and publish it here so everyone knows what to expect when using them
Also, after using WPMU's plugins I've noticed a huge increase in my sites speed, you can read about that here: https://www.seoclerks.com/faq/2879...ro-Plugin-Review They had their hosting in Selective Beta, meaning they only had a few people accessing it, but now it's in open beta and seems to be pretty good from what I've experienced so far :D I was having a problem with my domain propagating, but it was because I messed something up in the DNS records lol :D The really nice thing about this is that you get to host 3 sites for free, each on $10 hosting plans, but you still get dedicated resources for each site. This means you're not on a shared hosting plan and have to worry about someone else buying 10,000,000 visitors a day and flooding the server you're sharing, which will slow your website. If your site is slowing down, it's either because you messed something up or the server itself is not doing well lol. As for the only downside, not being able to create email addresses, I've found Improv.mx and plan on trying them out. I'll have to edit my records, which takes a minute or two, but I should be able to set up a support@, social@, MyName@, NoReply@, and any other email I plan on using. It's free to use this service and they have a premium $9 a month plan but that's not really needed lol. If everything goes well with this email forwarding service I will definitely write up a review on them and publish it here so everyone knows what to expect when using them :) Also, after using WPMU's plugins I've noticed a huge increase in my sites speed, you can read about that here: [url=https://www.seoclerks.com/faq/28796/WPMU-DEV-Smush-Pro-Plugin-Review]https://www.seoclerks.com/faq/28796/WPMU-DEV-Smush-Pro-Plugin-Review[/url]
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