Social network building platforms for creating community sites with profiles, activity feeds, and member interactions. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Self-hosted social networking software gives you the parts of a Facebook group that matter to a membership organisation: profiles, connections, groups, an activity feed, private messages and file sharing, all running on hosting you control, with a member list nobody else can switch off. The two applications here solve that in completely different ways, and the difference decides your hosting before you have written a word of copy.
BuddyPress is a WordPress plugin, not standalone software. It adds member profiles, groups, friendships and activity streams to a WordPress site you already run, which is how it reached more than 90,000 active installations. Version 14.5.2 is current. Its hosting profile is simply WordPress's hosting profile: PHP, MySQL, and the same theme and plugin stack you already look after. Elgg is the opposite proposition. It is a standalone social networking engine, currently at 7.0.5, and it sits closer to a framework than a finished product. Elgg 7 wants PHP 8.3 or newer, is happiest installed with Composer, and expects its data directory to live outside the document root.
The commercial comparison is Circle, which lists its Professional tier at US$89 a month plus transaction fees on anything you sell, Mighty Networks, Discourse where the community is mostly discussion, and a Facebook group if you are content renting the audience. Self-hosting drops the monthly platform fee, and more importantly keeps the member records and email addresses in a database you can export whenever you like.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
A professional association with a few thousand members wants the discussion, the member directory and the contact details in one place it owns rather than in a group it cannot export. BuddyPress bolted onto the WordPress site they already publish news on gets them there without introducing a second platform to administer.
Elgg began life in education and still suits a faculty or department that wants profiles, groups and file sharing behind a login, with no per-seat licence and no student data leaving the institution. It needs somebody comfortable at a command line, which an institution usually has and a small charity usually does not.
A course or coaching business charging a monthly subscription wants the community on its own domain and its own checkout, rather than handing a platform a percentage on top of the card fees. WordPress with a membership plugin plus BuddyPress puts the paywall and the community behind one login.
A special-interest group sharing photographs and files generates far more storage than it does traffic, so the plan has to be chosen on disk and database size rather than on visitor numbers. Self-hosting lets you buy storage independently of headcount, which per-member pricing does not.
We strongly recommend updating your sites as soon as possible.
Community software holds member email addresses, private messages and profile data, which makes it a far more attractive target than a brochure site. That July release carried two security fixes across three supported branches at once. Self-hosting means patching within days is a job you have now taken on, and automatic updates plus daily backups are what make that survivable.
A self-hosted community is a high-touch hosting workload. The activity stream creates database rows continuously, notification emails generate cron-driven outbound traffic, and member-uploaded media accumulates fast. We size MySQL with enough InnoDB buffer pool to keep the activity index in RAM, steer communities past a few hundred active members onto a managed cloud server for Redis object caching, and tune image optimisation so avatars and cover photos do not bloat the storage account in a year.
The load is signed-in traffic, and that changes how you size a plan. A community is almost entirely logged-in users, and page caching does nothing for a logged-in request. Every feed view, notification check and group page runs PHP and queries MySQL. Sizing a community on monthly visitors is the standard mistake; size it on how many members are active at the same time.
Be clear about the caching you actually get. Our shared WordPress and web hosting plans use StackCache, covering object, page and CDN layers. Redis object caching is a Managed Cloud Servers feature and is not available on shared hosting, so any BuddyPress tuning guide that opens with "install Redis" is describing a different product. Every plan does include unlimited LVE resources, so a busy evening will not get you throttled.
BuddyPress grows an activity table that becomes the busiest thing in the database. Switch off components you are not using and stop recording trivial actions as activity items. Elgg asks more of you again: PHP 8.3, a Composer workflow, and a data directory outside the web root.
Give this a miss if you have no moderation plan. Open registration on a public community attracts spam accounts within days, and no hosting plan fixes that for you.
Common questions we hear from people running social networking applications on 365i hosting.
It needs WordPress. BuddyPress is a plugin that adds member profiles, groups, friend connections, private messaging and activity streams to an existing WordPress site, so WordPress goes on first and BuddyPress goes inside it. That is good news for hosting, because the requirements are simply WordPress requirements and every WordPress plan here already meets them. It also means the community inherits your theme, your other plugins and your update routine, for better and for worse.
Not on shared hosting. Redis object caching is a Managed Cloud Servers feature only. Our shared WordPress and web hosting plans use StackCache, which covers object, page and CDN layers, and every plan carries unlimited LVE resources so a busy period does not get you throttled. Plenty of BuddyPress performance guides assume Redis is available everywhere, and on shared hosting anywhere it usually is not. If persistent object caching has become the deciding factor for your community, that is the signal to move up to a cloud server.
The activity stream, nearly every time. It is a large table that grows with every recorded action, and it gets read on the most-visited page of the site by exactly the users who cannot be served from cache. The fixes are unglamorous: disable BuddyPress components you do not use, stop logging trivial actions as activity items, prune old activity, and keep the plugin count sensible. Hosting helps, but a badly configured feed will outrun any plan you buy.
Choose BuddyPress if you already have a WordPress site, or want one, and the community belongs alongside it. Choose Elgg if you want a standalone social platform and you have somebody technical who will own it. Elgg 7 wants PHP 8.3 or newer, prefers a Composer install, and expects its data directory outside the web root, which is a different level of comfort from clicking an installer. Elgg is a framework you build on more than a product you configure.
The subscription goes away and a maintenance job arrives. Circle lists its Professional tier at US$89 a month plus transaction fees on what you sell; self-hosting swaps that for our entry web hosting plan and your own time. Be honest about the second part, because it is the part people underestimate: updates, spam moderation, backups you have actually tested, and the occasional plugin conflict on a Friday. If nobody in the organisation will own that work, the subscription is cheaper than it looks on paper.
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All 2 social networking applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
