I get asked every now and then how do I make sure that all of my traffic and all of my members will be supported by my server and I hear this question from people who have never set up a membership site in their entire lives, some of them who have never made a sale in their lives and yet they’re already worried about getting traffic. The problem with this is like a majority of questions people ask, they’re just roadblocks they’re putting up in their own way to prevent themselves from having to set something up. I have many sites where there are 20 to 50 people inside the membership site at any given time and my server can handle the traffic.
So, don’t get ahead of yourself. Focus on getting the membership site done already and then worry about your server not being able to handle the load. Yes, it is possible to create a membership site on a shared account. Then if you get enough sales, say more than a couple hundred dollars a month, move your sites to a dedicated server. You can get a decent dedicated server for about 100 bucks a month. And even then, you don’t need to cluster, you don’t need a lot of fancy software, it can handle the load for many thousands and thousands of members. And in addition, WordPress blogs have caching plugins. There’s that built-in Cache plugin, there is a Super Cache plugin. It has ways of if it generates a page for somebody, it will save it for later on, so that it doesn’t have to keep recreating the same WordPress page or post over and over again.
So, WordPress already has a bunch of built-in stuff to keep your server load down, but the most important thing is that computers are fast, and most of the time, you’re not going to even need a dedicated server, but if you happen to have a lot of traffic and you’re making a lot of money, you can’t have a dedicated server, but usually that’s the only step you need to take.
One final piece of advice I want to leave you with as far as managing your membership site traffic is drip the content. If you drip the content, if somebody joins your site and they can only stream the videos, if they can’t download, or if they can even only just see a week or two when they first joined and a small amount every few days, then people cannot join and download gigabytes and gigabytes and then leave.
So, those things will help to keep your traffic under control and keep your membership site manageable. First of all, get your membership site done and worry about the traffic later, but plan on moving from your shared hosting account to a dedicated server if and when your membership site makes you $500 a month or more. If it becomes a serious problem, look into caching plugins that will store the pages and posts generated by WordPress until later, and drip your content. Only give a small amount when they first joined and a little bit over time to prevent people from joining, downloading gigabytes and gigabytes, and then leaving.
How close are you to finishing your membership site? Let’s get that totally out of the way at www.membershipcube.com. It’s a great training course.