[eluser]Jim OHalloran[/eluser]
[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]
What have your experiences been with installation ease / speed & performance / reliability? [/quote]
Installation is easy, these days I can usually get CI installed (including mod_rewrite), and talking to a database ready to start coding in around half an hour.
Speed/Performance is largely dependant on how you code. If you write slow code, your site (using CI) will be slow. The framework itself doesn't have any inherrent performance problems.
Reliability is good, CI "just works". docs are also good which assists with learning CI, and once you're up and running it's quite intuitive.
[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]
Is resource consumption a big concern? [/quote]
Only if you write code that consumes resources. CI itself is pretty lightweight.
[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]
How beefy a setup would be needed for someone launching lots of small to medium sized sites? What about very large (5000 page +) sites?[/quote]
Not particularly beefy, you could start off using any decent shared hosting account, or a small virtual server (VPS).
[quote author="bamurph" date="1192493761"]
Any recommendations or warnings on hosting? [/quote]
I use OpenHosting. $US19.95/mth buys me a virtual server, with more than enough disk space, bandwidth, etc to run a number of sites. Downside to OpenHosting is that you'll need some SysAdmin savvy to set up/manage the VPS yourself, but if you're comfortable with the Linux command line it's ideal.
When looking at hosts though, make get one that's running PHP 5. Although CI supports PHP 4, some features just work better in PHP 5, and PHP 4 support will be discontinued (by the PHP team, not CI) inside the next 12 months.
Jim.