How to launch a social network with a load of 1-5k users for dummies?

Question

Startups

The very functionality of the social network, the community is almost ready. The backbone is wordpress + buddypress wrapped in convenient and nice functionality.

Target audience - regional centers of Russia. Cottage settlements united by one area. Villages and nearby villages included in a certain area. It is based on the idea of ​​uniting the inhabitants of a certain area, and providing them with a convenient platform for communication.
And in general, everyone only looks at the cities - and in fact, in the native virgin lands, the potential is unplowed! If you approach him with the right tractor)

So I have a question. On what hosting, server, vds and how do I host the project? This is what I mean if (and suddenly) the project becomes popular dramatically. For example, in a large village of 50 thousand inhabitants.Potential users of them 1-5 thousand.
How should I prepare for such a load? I've only dealt with shared hosting before. I read about VPS, dedicated server and CDN on Wikipedia. If necessary, I can probably figure it out.
Now I have a task to feel the reaction at the start. And for this you do not want to buy an elephant.
Please tell me how should I do!

Answer 1

When it comes to hosting, there is a right answer: DigitalOcean

Answer 2

1-5 thousand users will survive even virtual hosting (normal of course).
In general, I would advise taking a cloud VPS, all the advantages of a dedicated server + the ability to quickly scale with increasing load. There is no particular need for a CDN at the initial stage. Just monitor the load, when you realize that there is a lot of traffic, and this can interfere with the server, you can start thinking about CDN.

Answer 3

I would recommend BlueHost - used it myself and was extremely pleased with everything. A base of 5000 active visitors is a fairly light load, allowing you to choose from the widest offer of classic and semi-classical PHP shared hostings for every taste, usually characterized by very low prices with (which is facilitated by fierce competition at present) a fairly good service.
I don’t see the point in taking VDS under such task conditions (PHP, WordPress, light load) - it’s better to let the hosting admins take care of you and take the lion’s share of the problems (correctly setting up the HTTP server stack) on yourself.
UPDATE:Confused DigitalOcean with DreamHost. I didn’t hear any complaints about DigitalOcean, I meant DreamHost (and everything seems to have been fixed on it a long time ago). The rest of the answer is valid.

Answer 4

With virtual hosting, it may turn out that the hoster will simply ask you to move away from it or to a dedicated server. In the event of a sudden surge in visitors/load.
It has already been correctly advised here - a cloud virtual server, since it can be scaled.
I, in turn, can expand this advice by paying attention to virtualization.
Judging by the answers, everyone is used to measuring with familiar things. For my part, it will be the FirstVDS hoster and the Fast and the Furious tariff .
It is located in the Moscow DC, which will have a positive effect on the speed of access to the resource.
This is honest hardware virtualization of KVM, like a toy dedicated server without virtualization restrictions, as it could be done on openvz. Therefore, you can use various interesting settings, as on an adult server =)
At first, you can order with minimal resources and buy more as needed.
The virtual server itself is hosted on a node where there is a raid10 SAS, which is close in speed, or even comparable to SSD, and the reliability is higher.
The only negative is one common physical network interface. But this is also solvable, if visitors start to wildly want to watch/upload movies on your social network.