Elgg
Hosting

Elgg is the social network platform you choose when you specifically don't want Facebook, Discord, or LinkedIn. That sounds reductive but it's the most accurate way to describe its niche. If you're running a university research community, an internal company social network, an alumni network, or a serious-interest hobby community, Elgg gives you the social-network experience without handing your members' data to a third party or letting an algorithm decide what they see.

I've hosted Elgg communities for a couple of academic groups and a hobby society over the years. The pattern is clear: the community has an identity, the members value privacy and ownership, and the moderators want to control feature set and feel. Off-the-shelf social platforms can't deliver that. Elgg can.

What works well: the access-control system is genuinely well-designed. Every piece of content has explicit visibility (private, friends, group, logged-in users, public) and Elgg respects those settings throughout the platform. Group functionality is solid out of the box. Activity streams are clean. Plug-in architecture lets you extend without forking core. The admin tools give moderators real control over content and members.

"Elgg is the right answer when a community wants its own space and the discipline to run it. The first six months are work. After that, it tends to stick. We host two Elgg communities that have been running for over a decade with the same handful of moderators."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

What's annoying: the project's pace has slowed considerably. Major releases are infrequent. The plug-in marketplace is small and many plug-ins haven't been updated for current Elgg releases. Theme customisation requires real PHP and template knowledge. Modern social-platform expectations (real-time updates, mobile push notifications, slick mobile UI) require plug-in work or aren't available. Onboarding a non-technical user community takes more handholding than handing them a Facebook group.

Hosting notes: Elgg sits comfortably on our shared hosting from £5.99/mo for communities under maybe 500 active users. PHP memory at 256MB is enough. MySQL 8 handles the schema fine. Cron is essential, used for activity stream digests and email notifications, and we support it. File uploads can grow significantly over time, so factor in storage growth and backup cost. We've never seen Elgg exhaust unlimited LVE resources at typical small-community traffic.

For larger Elgg deployments (1,000+ active users, real-time chat plug-ins, large file uploads), the application benefits from our managed cloud servers from £9.99/mo with proper memory and database tuning. Elgg's database can grow large with active social use, and an under-tuned MySQL instance starts to drag on the activity-stream queries first.

If you're considering Elgg in 2026, do the honest test: how big is your moderation team, how committed is your community, and how much hand-holding do your members need? Elgg rewards a disciplined moderator team and a motivated user base. It's not the right answer for a casual community that would be happier on a Discord server. For the right community, though, it's the only sensible self-hosted option.