WordPress have announced that they’re getting into VIP Hosting which allows some pretty major blogs to ‘piggyback’ on the back of their WordPress.com hosting infrastructure. Basically it’s for blogs that don’t want to use WordPress.com as a platform but who need reliable hosting for their blog. Here’s how they describe it as working:
- You create WordPress.com accounts, import your content, and point your DNS at us.
- We load balance your site across our dozens of servers.
- You can have your own domain name.
- All of your administration will be over SSL, which means no one can sniff your password.
- People logged in to WordPress.com will also be logged in on your domain, which makes it easier for them to comment and link you. (Also gives you free integration with our My Comments, Tag Surfer, and avatar features.)
- Included Akismet spam protection.
- Inclusion in our top lists, which can drive a great deal of traffic.
- You will have the ability to edit your templates via Subversion (SVN).
- You can run most plugins (that don’t modify DB tables).
- There are no restrictions on ads, javascript, etc.
What does it ‘cost’?
- A “Powered by WordPress.com” logo on your site.
- A few standard hooks in your template for our centralized stats.
- Your tags go into and point to our Tags community.
- $500 to setup your site and $250 a month.
It’s not for everyone – you need to do 100,000+ page views a month and have a high profile but it’s something I know some bloggers will be keen to explore. I particularly think it’ll be attractive to those bloggers who’ve been around a while, who’ve built up quite successful blogs but who are not technologically inclined. As one of these types of people myself I know that if I didn’t have some excellent people helping me out that I’d consider it.
Sure it’d not cheap (there’s quite a bit of criticism already going around about the price) – but I’m sure there are bloggers out there who would be willing to pay decent money for it all to be looked after by WP.
