When BuddyPress came out, many of my peers were excited. Including me. Why not? How fun would it be to have your own mini Facebook/Twitter? Alas, it was only for WordPressMU and unfortunately, because MU at that time, was not as easy to set up as WordPress, and the resource issues on – MU is not recommended for shared hosting, it’s not everyone who could run a BuddyPress site.

Last week, the developers released a new version that works on regular WordPress as well. So once again, all the same people who wanted to run one are rallying around the idea. Some questions have cropped up.

• Do you still need a VPS or dedicated server?
• Can it work with my existing theme?

Thankfully some questions have been answered for you. Regarding the themes, a typical BuddyPress installation does mean your theme will be completely changed. But the developers have been so nice to create a BuddyPress Template Pack to guide you.

As for the server. This one I’m not entirely sure at this point, not having ran it on a live site yet. Before, because it only ran on MU then yes, it is recommended you have a higher level of hosting. Shared or reseller (still shared hosting) won’t cut it. Here’s my thinking. You can install and reasonably run BP without VPS or higher hosting on a regular WordPress BUT, I’d keep an eye on things.

It all boils down to the good old fashioned hosting question. How busy will your site be? If you’re expecting it to take off like gang busters and it actually does, you rake in hundreds or thousands of users at a time, and a large percentage all actively posting to their activity streams, responding in the forums with email notifications flying everywhere then… it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out your site will require a lot more server resources than normal. After all, if Twitter can have resource issues so can you and most of us, run on hosting that is many many times smaller than them.

Oh yeah, having a web host that can reliably grow with you is also a good thing.