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Elgg is a great platform for social networking because of its comprehensive service offering. If your social network is driven by blogging – then Elgg can serve as your platform. If your social network needs to incorporate bookmarking, chat, and message boards – Elgg can serve as your platform. With APIs and available plugins from Elgg, there is almost nothing a social network can accomplish for its users.

While Elgg is great as a social networking platform because it is so flexible in its capabilities, it can be too robust for webmasters who are new to managing a network or for user bases that are limited in their comfort with leveraging the internet. Before you plan on deploying Elgg as your platform for launching a social network, consider your own personal technical expertise and the expertise of your audience. While a robust platform like this may be great for millennials who are fans of a video game franchise, there are probably too many bells and whistles for a social network designed to provide support for senior citizens.

There are many social networking content management systems on the market today. If you are looking to create a 100% authentic social network platform and manage it as such, then platforms like Dolphin, PHPfox, and Oxwall should be able to help you create a similar experience. If you are already comfortable with content platforms like WordPress, then an alternative like BuddyPress may be a good option.

In order to unlock all of the capabilities available to you through Elgg, PHP programming knowledge will be valuable. If you want to design a theme, allow your users to have robust profiles, or integrate communications solutions, then you need to know how to utilize APIs to make all of that possible.

Installation of Elgg is available through 1-click installs from a wide variety of hosting providers. An Apache server with Linux, MySQL and PHP capabilities should be fine for running Elgg. Of course, if you have doubts about whether or not your current server is capable of handling Elgg as your social CMS, you should consult with your hosting provider.

Elgg has some very transparent information on its website related to the server requirements. For most website owners starting out with Elgg, however, the installation of a modern “LAMP” stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) should be able to handle your website as it gets off the ground with users and traffic.

In the early going of your social network, you shouldn’t face any problems hosting Elgg on a shared server. You will likely face a challenge with continuing to use shared hosting as your user base grows. If you can afford to deploy Elgg on a dedicated server, it may be a good choice. On a dedicated server (bare metal of virtual) your site can grow without the need for being faced with the decision to upgrade once your shared hosting hits its max bandwidth.

Self-hosted websites do not require YOU to personally own a server and manage it to host your site. Instead, self-hosted simply means that hosting is not provided directly by the development team that created Elgg. In order to use a self-hosted content management system like Elgg, you will need to contract a hosting provider before building your website.

The answer to this question depends on your answer to the question “how much responsibility are you willing to accept for the maintenance of your website?” The more complex your site becomes with modules, features, and streaming applications, the greater your need will be for professionally managed website hosting. Shared hosting often comes with some managed services included. If you have a dedicated hosting solution, however, managed services are likely required as part of your agreement. This is the case with any self-hosted content management system for social networking – not just Elgg. Consult with your hosting provider before making a final decision on how much management your hosting package is going to require.

In comparison to Elgg, Dolphin is not the easiest content management system to install and update. Often times, Dolphin’s license also requires attribution. By comparison, Elgg is completely open source and includes many (but not all) of the same features as Dolphin, assuming you know PHP and can setup API protocols. So while you may spend a little bit more in terms of hosting and features with Dolphin, you may also have more flexibility and custom features when compared to Elgg. Dolphin is often considered to be an ‘easy’ solution to install and update. On the downside, its license requires attribution and can prevent businesses that want to white label their social network from being able to do so. Also, there can be additional software costs involved with Dolphin if you buy a package with additional features. Elgg is completely open source, free to use and includes many of the same features as Dolphin.

Elgg is a full framework designed to launch your social network. By comparison, BuddyPress is a plugin that can be installed on the WordPress framework to launch a social network. If you have the comfort with development and building a network from scratch, then Elgg will be a better solution than BuddyPress. However, beginners to programming will likely find the management aspect of Elgg to be very difficult and too rich with custom features. With BuddyPress being built upon the web’s leading platform – WordPress – you may find yourself much better off with using BuddyPress for social networks that cater towards older users of the Internet.