WordPress.com has announced a new VIP Hosting plan. You pay them a $500 setup fee and $250 a month and they host your WordPress blog. They say the service is aimed at people who get more than 100,000 pageviews a month, and they justify the jaw-dropping price by spouting lots of gibberish about load-balanced servers and backups and your very own domain name (ZOMG!).
I’m sure their load-balanced, geographically diverse servers are nice and all, but $250 a month? Plus a $500 setup fee? And all you get is a damn blog? And it’s a damn WordPress blog on top of that? They’re clearly targeting people who are:
- Not at all technically-inclined (i.e., incapable of setting up a Blogger account)
- Rich (or so popular that they can generate enough ad revenue to cover the ridiculous fees)
- Gullible enough to believe they need a dozen load-balanced servers to handle 100,000 pageviews a month
Okay, maybe that last one is a stretch. Given WordPress’s horrible performance, maybe it actually does need a dozen load-balanced servers to handle that kind of traffic. Whatever. If people actually fall for this thing, good on WordPress. There’s a sucker born every minute, and who am I to say they shouldn’t be parted from their money?
For the record, wonko.com averages over 200,000 pageviews a month and my server (for which I pay $99 a month in hosting fees) barely even notices. Could I withstand a Slashdotting or a Digging? Probably. All it takes is bandwidth and a smart static page cache. Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened yet, so I can’t say that with complete certainty.
But I can say with complete certainty that WordPress’s VIP Hosting is a ripoff.
Comments
200,000
That's impressive... Alexa Traffic Rank for wonko.com: 496,497.
Re: 200,000
I don't know whether that Alexa rank is good or bad, but I do know that Alexa is very statistically inaccurate, since their stats only reflect IE users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. 69.7% of wonko.com visitors are using browsers other than IE according to my server logs (which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy).
What is considered a big WordPress site?
Is a WordPress site with 3.5 million pageviews a month considered big?
Nice
i alway wondering what was vip about thanks know i now good info nice page also.
Limited functionality with Regular Wordpress.com blog
I’ve been a long time Blogger user but for a new project, I decided to give Wordpress a try – I’ve been hearing how superior it is for the past 5 years. Without doing that much research, I just assumed Wordpress.com is what one uses for hosting. Anyway, I’m a little disappointed. Even though I’ve paid 20-30$ for domain forwarding, I found that I have very little control over my blog other than choosing from a set of existing themes. For example, If I liked a theme, but wanted a bigger header image – can’t do it. What’s most annoying is I can’t use any existing wordpress plugins (some of which seem good) that arent offered by Wordpress.com. Google Analytics is one of these that aren’t supported?!? Anyway, I found this by searching for “Wordpress.com ripoff” lol.
Too expensive