When it comes to running a community on WordPress, Buddy Boss is still a pretty big contender. It’s pretty popular. It does a lot of stuff, and so it makes perfect sense. However, I’ve talked about Buddy Boss for years. I actually used to be a massive fan of it, and the keyword there is used to. These days, my thoughts have changed, and I wanted to make a video here where I talk about where I currently stand on the world of Buddy Boss. And then I also want to talk about rapid hosting, because because the hosting requirements of Buddy Boss always come up because it’s just that type of plugin, and they position rapid as the best option because it’s built by them. And so I wanted to talk about that and talk a little bit about my experience using rapid hosting. Okay, so let’s talk about Buddy Boss and rapid hosting. Now, Now, the reason that I’m bringing this up today is because I used to use Buddy Boss a while back, and even now, if you go and you search for Buddy Boss Hosting, one of my videos is going to be one of the ones that comes up fairly regularly.

But that was back when I used to use Buddy Boss. I don’t use Buddy Boss anymore. And in fact, I tend to recommend people really think before they head into the world of Buddy Boss, for multiple reasons. But one of the big ones is that Buddy is now such a beast. I feel like it’s over-engineered. I feel like its hosting requirements are a little bit ridiculous, to be honest. And it’s mainly because it does so much. It’s not even a very efficient plugin. Because It’s so over-engineered. And the company, I believe, has gotten a little bit corporate in the fact that they’re trying to do a lot of upsells with regard to the hosting, with regard to their app development, stuff like that. Even just now, as of this video, they’re now changing their licensing system. I will say the upgrade for that has been very problematic. It actually literally broke one of my client’s websites. He’s not alone because the Buddy Boss groups have been aflame with some of the issues out there with the Zoom integration breaking, and they called that a minor issue, even though that’s not minor. It literally broke an entire feature.

But they’re licensing, apparently now, even the free plugin. And Why would they want to require license codes for a free plugin? They’re really only doing that so that they can… They’re probably doing a little bit of data mining. I’m just guessing. I don’t know. But secondly, they want to control distribution. So at the end of the day, I do feel as if the company is getting a little bit less flexible. Their software is problematic because it breaks. It just does. I also feel as if it causes complications for people. At the end of the day, I’m all a matter of simplicity. And I’m going to recommend for my clients the software that I believe is going to run their sites the best and give them the least trouble. Buddy Boss inherently is just not that. In fact, of all the sites that I manage as part of Concierge, if any site is going to be more troublesome and be more likely to break on an upgrade, it’s going to be a BuddyBoss site. It almost always is a Buddy Ball site. And why is that? Because one, is Buddy Balls is a complex plugin, and complexity means things are more likely to break.

Secondly, the Buddy Balls theme is inherently very difficult to modify. And so what ends up happening is that you put a page builder on there, such as Elementor. And so almost every Buddy Boss site I’ve ever seen runs Elementor You’ve got the Elementor plugin, you’ve got the Pro plugin for Elementor. That’s another plugin that is pretty notorious for breaking stuff when things are upgraded. And as a Buddy Boss site owner, you’re running both of them. You’re running both Elementor and you’re running the buddy ball system, and your site is just a complicated beast when you have to run this stuff. And inevitably, a buddy ball site is going to run other plugins besides those And so it’s very normal for me to see Buddy Ball sites running 30, 40, 50 plugins at a time, and it’s a big hunker of a website. And those types of sites are more likely to break. When it comes to Buddy Boss itself, it’s just even if you take out a lot of those complexities, it tends to be a bit of a performance drag. It does require higher levels of hosting requirements. And that brings me to rapid rapid hosting, which is also something that I want to talk about.

I just noticed that my dog was there in the frame there in the background, but whatever. He has free reign of the office. So anyway, let’s talk a little bit about rapid hosting here as well. Rapid hosting, I’m not… Here’s the thing. Rapid hosting seems as if it is a mixed bag. What I have find is that a lot of buddy boss people feel like they should go with rapid hosting because they They have come up against the problems with regard to Buddy Ball’s performance. And so, of course, their recommended hosting is going to be rapid because it’s the same company. I mean, it’s one of It’s one of their revenue sources. So it makes perfect sense. Now, here’s the thing. Let’s talk about RAPID Hosting as a company, because it’s not what I use, but I do have a couple of clients, with Buddy Ball sites, of course, that use RAPID. Neither one of them, by the way, is particularly in love with it. They just use it because they feel like they have to. And I’m telling them that they don’t have to. Now, one of them, the site’s busy, and so the hosting requirements are definitely going to be there unless he migrates away from Buddy Boss.

The other site, interestingly enough, her site’s not even technically launched yet, so it doesn’t have that much traffic. And yet, RAPID has come to her and says that we should increase your plan to the second-level business plan, which is going to increase her plan by $40 a month, bringing her bill up to about $167 a month for a buddy boss site that’s not even launched yet, and it’s not getting that much traffic. It’s seemingly because about a month ago, her site used more compute power than was a clouded to her. They call them cloudlets, some an arbitrary compute measurement they have internally at RAPID. And she used too many, and they want to increase her plan because of it. Now, here’s the thing. Sometimes that Everything happens when you’re running a website. You have bots or a fact of life. They do sometimes cause traffic spikes. Your web host should not only be able to absorb the traffic spike, but they should not come and hit you up for a bill increase just because it happens. They should be going based on the average. Now, if she’s near the limit of the business one plan, which is already 119 a month for a non-launched site on rapid, then that is a weak hosting plan.

From my perspective, it seems as if she’s really paying a lot of money for a web host that’s just not giving her very much wiggle room. And that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Now, I will say sites on rapid tend to perform pretty well. They have definitely done some things to accommodate for dynamic membership sites like Buddy Ball. So they do work. But around the edges of that, I would say that RAPID is a little on the rough side. Their support is average. When I’ve had to deal with their live chat support, sometimes they’re on point, sometimes they truly suck. Most recently, I went to live chat to fix a problem because this same client had her site literally go offline. That’s not right, okay? And so I go to live chat and we’re trying to work it out. But the thing is, there was nobody there. And so it was a five-hour delay until anybody replied to the ticket. That’s ridiculous, especially when you’re in a situation like that. Now, the issue did resolve itself, but when it was happening, it was down for 10 or 15 minutes. Her admin panel was completely non-responsive, and then it came back.

Clearly, that is a problem with their server, okay? And yet I could not reach anybody to deal with it. And this is on top of them wanting to increase her bill. When I’m going around the control panel inside a rapid, it’s sluggish. You go to a screen and it’s like it loads the initial UI, and then it has to wait for all the data to fill in. It’s just one of those things to where I do believe that RAPID is probably a perfectly fine web host overall in terms of the technical setup. But I do believe they’re a little rough around the edges. I don’t believe they have their support completely dialed in yet. And I do think that it’s overpriced because I could probably take this same person’s site and put it over on rocket. Net, which is what I use most of the time, and it will perform platform, probably equally as good. And not only that, I know for a fact that if you get a little traffic spike, Rocket will just absorb it, and they’re not going to come back at you and say, We need to increase your bill, because it’s just not the way Rocket works.

Not only that, when you go to live to support, I don’t have to go through an AI bot, whereas with Rapid, you do. You have to talk with a stupid bot first before I can get to a human, so I hate that. But secondly, Secondly, I have a human on the line with Rocket within seconds, every single time, and they, almost all the time, are quite good at what they do. So that’s a big thing right there. And I will say Rocket is also significantly cheaper. So what are people paying for with rapid hosting? They’re paying for it, I think, because they feel like they’re stuck in a buddy boss ecosystem, and that it’s so demanding and so annoying, and they feel like rapid is just going to be the solution, but it’s not. I don’t think that rapid is the shining light on the top of the hill for buddy-ball site owners. It’s not bad. It’s just, it’s not… It’s in line with other web hosts. You could probably take a buddy-ball site to a good virtual private server through a number of different hosts out there. Xcloud is my other host. I bet you you could run a buddy-ball site just fine there.

Gridpain is also a really great one with great support, and you’d probably would get… It would be just as good, if not better, because at least with a VPS, you’d have dedicated horsepower versus the cloud setup that RAPID has. So where do we stand today with Buddy Boss? If somebody is starting over with a community site, I would not recommend that you go into BuddyBoss. Buddy Boss, because I do believe that Buddy Boss, it feels like it’s got tentacles. And once you’re in that ecosystem, it’s going to feel difficult to get out of it because your site is baked in with Buddy Boss. Because Buddy Boss does so many things, it’s a complex plugin. It is more likely to break. There’s just no doubt about it. It is more likely to have plugin conflicts and the like. If you’re trying to have a low maintenance community community-driven membership site, you’re probably not going to find it with a buddy boss site. So if you really feel as if you need a community, which definitely is something that you need to evaluate, because as I’ve said, I do think some people jump into the deep end with a community getting into a buddy boss site when they really don’t need it.

They don’t even know if their people are going to need or want a community that badly. But that being said, when you start to look at third-party platforms, and we’re talking about not WordPress here, we’re talking about things like circle. So you compare the pricing for a platform like that with the comparative pricing of doing it on top of WordPress with something like Buddy Boss and all the other plugin licenses you’re probably going to need, and then the cost of the expense of hosting. I do find that there’s a compelling case for going away from WordPress in such an instance. And in fact, I’ve had one… No, she She wasn’t using Buddy Boss, but she did decide to go to circle. Anyway. So cost-wise, Buddy Boss is making it so that it’s starting to make less sense to run a community like that on top of WordPress. I mean, I’m the biggest proponent of data sovereignty, digital sovereignty, and owning your own platform. And you still would own it if it’s on WordPress, but the amount of headache that can come with it. And so here’s the thing. Bunny Boss is still the most powerful community platform for WordPress.

It just is. If you need all that stuff, then your Bunny Boss is where you’re going to go, and you can make it work. Just be willing to deal with the issues. It’s not like it’s going to be a nightmare, but you’re going to deal with some. That’s the way it is. And also, don’t feel as if you need to go with rapid hosting. They’re not the only game in town. They’re not the only people who can run a buddy boss site. All right? But look at other options. I will say, check out Fluent Community. I think Fluent Community is a much better community platform for WordPress that happens to be much lighter. It’s performance friendly. It doesn’t do everything that Buddy Boss does, but it does the core stuff. It does most of what Buddy Boss sites end up doing. It just doesn’t do everything. But because it doesn’t do everything, it’s a much lighter platform, and they keep making it better all the time. So Fluent Community would be a much better way to go, in my personal opinion. It does not have the interface flexibility because it doesn’t have its own theme.

It just is what it is. It looks like circle or Facebook, but most of the time it works fine like that. I would look at something like that before you start looking into a buddy boss site. But if you really need that combination of features of buddy boss, go for it. It is the most powerful platform on WordPress. I would then go and look at something like circle and see if it might make a little bit more sense. You are going to be a little stuck over there, but just weigh out all the pros and cons. That’s where I stand with BuddyBoss these days. Now, with regard to rapid hosting, again, they have a good platform. It’s good. The admin panels for BuddyBoss sites are relatively relatively fast on rapid. So the technical setup of their hosting, I have nothing bad to say about it. I just feel like the company itself was a little bit rough around the edges, and I do feel as if their support leaves something to be desired. I don’t know if it’s understaffed or what it is. And I also feel like it’s overpriced for what you’re getting, and I think you probably could get equivalent or better set up in other locations, such as a virtual private server or something like that.

And that is where I hand on the world of Buddy Boss these days. I respect the platform. I wish, also, Motiv didn’t own it these days, but I respect the platform. It’s just that they’ve gotten really big, they’ve gotten really corporate. The way that they’re handling their licensing has been problematic because now they’re even going to require a license code for the free plugin. I don’t know. It’s just one of those things where you’re getting into an ecosystem when you go into Buddy Boss, and it’s an ecosystem that once you’re really in it, it’s going to feel like a lot of work to get out of it. So you just want to think it through and really make sure that you need and want what Buddy Boss will provide. All right, I will wrap this up with a couple of thoughts. First of all, this is just my opinion. As you could tell, this video was very off the cuff, very, very unscripted, and it’s my opinion. And so I do realize that other people may have different experiences with Buddy Boss and RAPID. And I hope I’ve also tempered my thoughts in the fact that I don’t think that either one is bad.

I just want people to go in with their eyes wide open and realize what they’re looking at. Being that I run concierge, I deal with a lot of sites. And I am telling you straight up that the sites that run Buddy Boss and Elementor are the ones that are the most work. They’re the ones that have the most problems, bar none without Without exception. And so you need to know that going in. Now, I do this stuff all the time, okay? And so I can keep Buddy Ball sites out of trouble. I know the platform, and I do have multiple clients running Buddy Ball sites. And so I can keep them going. It’s totally fine. And in fact, if you are running a Buddy Ball site and you’re getting a little bit fed up with the whole thing, hey, maybe come on with me with concierge, and I can help you deal with it, okay? I mean, it’s not a nightmare platform by any means, but it just has its kinks. It has its kinks. But if you have the right tools and you’re backing up every day, and you got enough hosting horsepower for it, it’ll run, it’ll be fine.

It’ll be a nice website. But anyways, that’s where we stand. And if you work with one of those companies, by the way, if you work inside of Buddy Ball, so you work with Rapid, again, no harm, no foul. I actually respect both of the companies. It’s just that I talk I give my opinions off the cuff here, and it is what it is. And I will say, again, both of my most recent clients that came in with Buddy Ball sites are both also on Rapid, and neither one of them is particularly like, yay. Both of them are on rapid because they feel like they don’t have much of a choice. And that’s a weird thing. I don’t want people to feel like they have to go with a web hosting company because of the plugin they use. It’s not really the way it’s supposed to work. So anyway, those are some off-the-cuff thoughts. Maybe my next video will be a little bit more on point. All right, if you have any questions about any of this, feel free to post in the comments. Talk to you later.