How many blogs can you put on one server?
 

How many before performance becomes a problem?

Also, any tips/tricks to make things go faster and reduce server load?

Interesting question.... Depends on many factors though.

i would love to know this as well

Depends on the server, blogs can take allot of CPU so use as much ram as you can if you want to add allot.

Around 4 gigs of ram and a HT 3.0 or dual xeon will run a couple hundred easy.

What about a smaller VPS?

Optimize your mysql, keep the images on any php pages as small as possible.

Use more pages so less information is on each page.

large images, large pages, are some of the top CPU suckers.

Once again depends how much of the cpu and ram is alloted.

I would feel comfortable with 40-50 as long as you have a p4 and at least 1 gig of ram alloted to your VPS. To keep things ata peak at all time run less then about 35 active blogs on a VPS

Can't really do that.
I'm not going to design my blogs around the server....I need to design the server around the blogs.
If I need more servers/more RAM whatever, that's fine.

I get alot of hangups with pages loading sometimes....can't tell if it's my server or maybe it's the iframe ads slowing things down.

This depends entirely on traffic and the load of your blog on the server.

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Well, you can host as many blogs as your system supports, so there's not an specific answer for this, but I'd recommend having less blogs and more servers with diff class C IPs to get more SE traffic

:2 cents:

We have a customer that was recently having issues with performance due to the fact that he was running 2,000+ blogs on 512 MB RAM.

Bumped him up to 2 GB and all is well.

yeah, I was about to mention something like that. Our network has 350-400 blogs running on a P4 512 RAM without any problem, 10Mbits unmanaged for very *very* little money :thumbsup

It all really depends on what software you're using and how optimized it is. Last time i checked slashdot was ran off of 3 p4 1.6's, whereas they would probably need 100+ servers if they were just simply using wordpress/mysql.

use something like wp-cache to reduce the mysql queries to the database

on a side note - does it matter if you got all your blogs on one db or on seperate db's? (talking about wordpress)