Ability and scalability of HivePress (user and listing limits, hosting recommendations)

General HivePress
3

Hi,

  1. There are no limits set in the code, this depends on many aspects like hosting plan, caching, optimization, ratio of active users/listings etc.
  2. Yes, there were websites with about 100,000 listings shared via support tickets but unless customers willingly submit their website to the Showcase unfortunately we can’t share these publicly.
  3. This also depends on many aspects, I recommend starting with the basic plan, preferably VPS-based hosting (not shared one), and you can upgrade once you see that memory usage and/or CPU is close to the limit.
  4. There’s no specific CPU/RAM recommendation, but I recommend a VPS-based hosting because you’ll have more control of scalability.
  5. If you have basic server setup skills I recommend DigitalOcean, they have a ready-made installation of the OpenLiteSpeed server. If you use it along with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, then object cache and other optimizations will be available by default. Then you can go through the LiteSpeed settings to set up the image optimization, cache, minify and merge JS/CSS, etc. This should be enough unless there’s really significant traffic, along with tens of thousands user profiles and listings. If you don’t have basic server setup skills you can also check managed hosting providers if they claim to use VPS (e.g. Cloudways, it uses DigitalOcean servers).

The main issue that may arise is related to the search performance, due to the WordPress database schema each additional search filter (if it’s not a selectable value, e.g. number of text) slows down the search because it’s performed on the same database table. We plan to resolve this by adding “lookup” table that’s in sync with the core tables, this should resolve the issue, but even with tens of thousands of listings and few search filters it should be ok with the current version.

You can start with the existing setup and customize or replace specific parts of the website if they cause issues (you’ll notice this in the server or hosting graphs), e.g. messaging (you can move it to a third-party API or platform), if there’s no rapid traffic growth there should be enough time to act accordingly.

Hope this helps