Elgg Cloud Hosting

Quick, Simple, and Scalable Elgg Cloud Hosting

What is Elgg Cloud Hosting?

The Elgg Cloud hosting service provided by Steadfast Networks allows our Cloud Platform clients to utilize an award-winning social networking engine that has been described as having your organization’s own private Facebook. This open source application has a framework designed to support a wide variety of online social environments. Clients have used them to create social networks specific to individual schools, colleges, or university campuses, as a communications tool to facilitate brand-building for companies and their clients, and as a platform for internal collaboration within an organization.

Going back to the Facebook analogy, Elgg incorporates several of the same concepts – groups, friends, an activity stream – as well as providing a number of optional widgets that can enable secondary features like:

Blogs and microblogs – Your posts can be shared to specific groups, or just certain individuals
Wire posts – Allows you to post sitewide notifications no matter what your group membership is
Twitter integration – Elgg will bi-directionally aggregate your Tweets and allow your Elgg posts to be sent out to your Twitter stream if you integrate your Twitter account
Flexible notifications – Email notifications can be customized to send you updates based on certain groups’ or friends’ activity
Even without the optional widgets, Elgg provides a full set of features that organizations can tap into. Its powerful yet flexible data model allows you to create different entities with simplicity. Your plugins will have no problem pushing content to your users with the granular activity stream API, and you can build and add the features you want with Elgg’s plugin API. The program also makes managing relationship requirements and users a breeze. Even more features can be found on the Elgg homepage.

In short, anyone considering an in-house social network should take a look at Elgg. And if you do decide to go with Elgg, Jumpbox through Steadfast Networks Cloud Platform is the easiest way to help you get started with it.

How Can You Get Elgg Cloud Hosting from Steadfast Networks?

Steadfast Networks offers Elgg Cloud hosting to our Cloud Platform users. We are able to do this through our ongoing relationship with Jumpbox, which includes not only Elgg, but a wide array of useful open source software for our clients to use.

All Cloud users need to do to use Elgg is select the Elgg JumpBox template. To do this, go to Operating System and select Ubuntu, then choose JumpBox Elgg. You’ll be able to start using this great open source software without any complex setup and installation processes.

System Requirements for Elgg Cloud Hosting

Elgg is one of a number of programs that runs on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) platform, the most popular web server environment on Earth. Because Elgg has such advanced functionality, there are several configuration requirements recommended for your system:

Increase memory available to PHP threads
Increase maximum uploaded file size
There are also several modules that should be installed on the Apache web server, including: mod_rewrite, PHP 5, MySQL 5+, PHP 5.2+ (installed as an Apache module with GD and Freetype, JSON, XML, and Multitype String support)

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