1. Getting Started

Each member of WPMU DEV receives 3 free hosted sites included with the membership.

We do this by applying a $30 credit to your account to be used on hosting. This means you can choose how this $30 is spent!

For example, you can choose from one of the following scenarios:

1. 3 sites on the $10 per month ‘Starter’ plan, at no additional monthly cost
2. 1 site on the $25 per month ‘Intermediate’ plan, at no additional monthly cost
3. 1 site on the $25 per month ‘Intermediate’ plan and then $5 off of a $10 ‘Starter’ plan (leaving you with a balance of $5 for the two sites)
4. $30 off of a site on our $50 per month ‘Advanced’ or $100 per month ‘Expert’ plan

In short, we will add up all of your monthly hosting costs and deduct $30 each month. The first $30 you spend on hosting will always be on us.

All members, including those on an introductory free trial, can create new hosting sites as needed.

Just log in to the ‘Hub’ and click on the ‘Hosting’ link. Look for the ‘+’ sign in the top left corner to begin.

Important Information:

• Your ‘Site Title’ can be changed at any time in the future
• Your ‘Temporary Destination Domin’ CAN NOT be changed in the future. This is the link you will use to access the site before you configure DNS and choose a final primary domain.
• Your ‘WordPress admin’ user information can be changed in the future. Do remember the password you set in order to access the WordPress Dashboard once the site is ready. If you lose it, you can always do a password reset by email.
• The ‘Server’ location CAN NOT be changed in the future without changing DNS information. The best idea is to always choose the location closest to where the majority of your sites’ visitors are.
• You can convert a single site to a ‘Multisite’ network in the future, but it is much more challenging to go the other way.

The best way to migrate a new site to our hosting is to use our Shipper Migration plugin available here.

You will need to create the site in our hosting Hub first, and then add the plugin to both the old and the new sites to complete the migration.

If you run into any trouble, just start a live chat or create a support ticket, and our team will help manually migrate too.

We currently offer hosting in the following locations:

• Canada (Toronto)
• Germany (Frankfurt)
• India (Bangalore)
• Netherlands (Amsterdam)
• Singapore
• United Kingdom (London)
• USA East (San Francisco)
• USA West (New York City)

All customer data, backups, storage, and files are contained fully in these regions.

We will make more locations available when and if our data center partner, Digital Ocean, brings more online.

Each site that we host gets its own plan, complete with its own dedicated memory, CPUs, storage, and usage limits.

You can see all plans and specs here.

You can upgrade plans at any time. You can also downgrade a plan at any time, however, please note that downgrading more than one level may require a DNS change and for our support team to help process manually. This is because of technical limitations around storage space in the environment. In these cases, we’ll set up a new hosting environment at the desired plan, and manually migrate the site’s files and content over.

We do not set hard limits on visits, bandwidth, or traffic, but we do provide recommended visit levels for each plan to help you determine which plan will be right for you. Your site will have lower performance, including brief outages, when your memory and CPU resources are maxed out.

Factors that might use more resources and thus require you to upgrade include:

• WordPress Multisite – Multisite networks are more taxing on server resources, especially Subdomain installs and those Multisite where you will have many logged in users.
• Membership Sites – Membership sites receive a higher percentage of traffic where users are logged in, which means that caching systems in place are not as helpful in managing their load.
• e-Commerce Sites – Similar to Membership sites, increase logged in activity for checkout can cause higher server load.
• Poorly coded themes or plugins, or those that require significant interaction with the database. Some themes and plugins just aren’t as efficient for performance as others. They may also add features that require higher processing loads.

Unlike many hosts, we support (and encourage!) the use of WordPress Multisite on all plans.

However, you should be aware that WordPress Multisite networks will use more server, CPU, and memory resources than standard WordPress single installs. So, if you have more than a handful of sites, you might find you need one of the higher plans to meet your WordPress Multisite network’s needs.

Subdirectory installations (ie. mysite.com/sitename) can be created by you in your Hosting Hub.

Subdirectory installations (ie. sitename.mysite.com) require manual work from our support team. Before converting or migrating a WordPress Multisite subdomain install, we need to be sure that you are able to:

1. Configure wildcard DNS for the desired domain with your domain registrar
2. Provide us with a wildcard SSL certificate for the desired name.