WordPress.com VIP

“When the day comes that I get hundreds of thousands of page views all at once, I want to be ready, and nobody knows more about handling massive amounts of traffic than Automattic does.” Harry McCracken / Editor, Technologizer

Blogging has enabled a new breed of publisher: people who create content on par with the Wall Street Journals and New Yorkers of the world, but when the ensuing audience comes to their site, they don’t have the technical expertise for their site to perform. Compounding the problem, many of these new publishers support themselves through advertising — where every minute of downtime translates to dollars lost. What happens to your website if…

• you get a spike of millions of page views per hour due to mainstream media, Digg, Slashdot, or BoingBoing? (Or all the above!)
• a hard drive in your server burns up?
• any one of the services on the server—MySQL, Apache, DNS, PHP—fails?
• every post gets deleted–is there a recent backup? How old is it?
• your datacenter’s network goes down or has problems?

As a result of building and running WordPress.com, we’ve solved these problems. We’ve invested thousands of hours and millions of dollars, and the proof is in the pudding: on any given day we do tens of millions of page views and hundreds of millions of hits. Digg, Yahoo, and Slashdot don’t even make a blip. We serve most pages in under a tenth of a second from geographically diverse datacenters. There are multiple copies of every bit of data synced from Dallas to San Antonio to Chicago, and we back up your data hourly.

Based on our experience running blogs like CNN’s Political Ticker, Dow Jones’ All Things D, The National Football League’s Official NFL blog, People Magazine’s Style Watch, Om Malik’s GigaOM, official blogs for communities like Flickr and the BBC’s Top Gear, and many other high-profile and high-traffic blogs using WordPress.com, we’ve put together something called VIP Hosting. It allows these folks to piggyback on our WordPress.com infrastructure, getting the benefits of what we’ve built without the limitations of a free WordPress.com account with regard to ad serving, theme editing, plugins, and JavaScript.

Because of the nature of this program it is not open to the public — it’s intended for high-profile publishers and startups that we have a good deal of confidence in. You might be a good candidate for VIP hosting if, for example, you get more than 1 million page views a month on your blog.

Pricing begins at $500/month per blog (with a one-time setup fee of $1,500 per blog) but is flexible depending on your circumstances and number of blogs.

We only want to do a handful of these, so we can’t accept everyone who applies. That said, don’t be shy. We’re always interested in meeting new and interesting folks.