Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.com has released VIP Hosting, where you get to host your blog on WP.com’s load balancing failover-ready hardware/infrastructure, using your own domain name, and there will be dedicated system administrators looking after network, hardware, database, web server and installation of WordPress to ensure everything is always up.
Cost? $500 to set it up, and $250/month to keep it going. And I am talking about US Dollars.
Sounds like it is not a service for me.
- Why do I have to pay when “Power by WordPress.com” is required to be displayed on the blog? Paying to advertise? Huh?
- It is still not a full self-hosted WordPress installation, and there are still limitations on what you can do.
- Editing template using SVN? You mean, no ssh?
- $750 just to get the first month going is really hefty. Even with $250/month, I can rent 10 256Mb VPS from some of these guys and cluster them myself. Hmm. That will be fun.
- But most importantly, Scott? Blog? Who?! I am nowhere near 100,000 page views a month, and I am stuck at the same traffic level over a year. Even $5/month shared hosting would be capable to host this blog (although this is hosted on a $13/month VPS).
Still, $250/month is expensive. I know it comes with load balancing, sysadmin, etc, but these things I can easily do myself. However as Matt commented here, the majority of $250 might be paid to sysadmins who constantly look after your sites. This is a managed service, an expensive one indeed, something that you might want to consider if you cannot tolerate other hosts’ pathetic 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Way to expensive! If you blog did have that much traffic that It actually needed a dedicated or VPS hosting you could get a managed solution for a fraction of that price.