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Very excited about this. Wordpress hosting for medium and large sites is a major pain point that I've dealt with on multiple occasions. Once a site grows beyond the cheapy hosting plans, there was a huge gap in the mid range before something like VIP became a possibility.
I am interested to see how existing sites migrate over, it looks like only a group of approved themes are allowed. Presumably, those looking to migrate will have to recreate their existing UI experience on one of those pre-approved themes.
The theme issue actually smells like a decent business opportunity for savvy Wordpress theme designers. If someone offers quick turnaround ports of old themes to supported themes, which is almost entirely CSS, I bet they'll get a lot of business as more and more sites want to move over to the Enterprise plan.
Anyone made the jump yet? How was the experience?
They're pushing features like "launch your site within minutes" and "customize your site without needing to touch the underlying PHP code," which makes it feel like they're playing to the wrong audience. By the time someone is ready to spend $500/month on hosting, you would think they'd have someone on their team who isn't intimidated by Wordpress level configuration or PHP.
Not true. The company site/blog may be the responsibility of a non-technical marketing person, for example. $500/month hosting plus some chunk of that person's time is much, much cheaper than hiring a PHP developer who must then work with the marketing person to implement the changes.
I guess I just don't see a situation where the only tech barrier (the only thing you would need regular access to a tech for) for a site that's getting thousands of daily page views is finding appropriate hosting.
Glad to see they continue to offer more products and services. How this compares to WPEngine and such?
For $3750/month I could get a lot more than just a WordPress install and the title "VIP".
It says $500/month on the annoucement
I made the same mistake. Click on the "our services" in the global nav you get to $3,750.
The correct link to "WordPress.com Enterprise" is buried in the text of the blog post.
It's $500/month only if you host it yourself, if you host with them it goes up to $3750/month.
I believe it's actually $500/month for just this "Enterprise" subscription, which gives you some level of support and access to a bunch of themes and plugins. Seems like the VIP level is different, and includes 24/7 phone support.
Will be interesting to see how the support actually stacks up. My experience with another popular "enterprise" Wordpress platform was been shockingly subpar (bad enough that we just bailed out and ate the loss since we paid a year up-front).
When I first saw this, I thought, "Oh good, finally Automattic has something to compete with Page.ly, WP Engine, and Synthesis (i.e. managed WordPress hosting)."
But then I read their prices. The other guys all have managed WP hosting plans starting at under $30/month.
Maybe Automattic is playing the old game "If we charge crazy high prices, the Enterprise customers will think we're better, thinking, 'you get what you pay for.' The other guys will look like cheap crap."
Their scheme will probably work. Automattic has a lot of cred. Red Hat and Acquia play the same game. It sounds like a good business, if you can get into it!
(Disclaimer: I have my personal website on wordpress.com service [the free version]. I'm also doing a trial with Synthesis.)
> you also get our new Javascript customization service that allows you the flexibility to customize your site without needing to touch the underlying PHP code
wtf is this, how it works, what it does, and where can I find more details?
so because it's an Enterprise thing, someone just decided to add one more bullet point "out of thin air" and pasted that incomprehensible thing about "Javascript customization" ...niiiiiice.
If you have $500/month to spend you could also get equivalent managed PHP hosting (that's all this is) from many other providers like RackSpace Cloud, etc. with spare money left over for an update service like ManageWP.
Enterprise runs on WP.com infrastructure (multi-datacenter, tens of thousands of CPU cores, terabytes of memory) so it's able to absorb traffic levels above what most cloud hosts can. The trade-off is you have less flexibility to modify stack than you would with a VPS or cloud hosting account.
You can probably get cheaper options than almost every Enterprise offering that's ever been made. However, they usually guarantee things like uptime, support response and updates that self-controlled hosting doesn't.
The "managed" hosting you're referring to typically means the NOC will troubleshoot services that are down or not working correctly with default settings. They won't, however, help you optimize your server or help with ANY code.
So if this WordPress offering provides the least bit of service for server/code optimization, then they're way ahead of the hosting game. But as you can see, it comes at a significant cost.
But there are also managed hosting companies specifically for WordPress, which offer pre-configured servers, optimized WordPress installs and WordPress related support. Most of these companies have custom solutions that are suitable for enterprise customers. A couple of them, such as BlogDroid or Pagely, will even help customers solve issues with their code's performance.
You are also getting WP support from folks that know the codebase really well. $500 for managed hosting with CDN and unlimited bandwidth? That's a great deal for any large publication.
But it sounds like with this you also get support for your WP site - which could be a good deal depending on your needs
wonder how much of this will stat eating in Autonomy's Teamsite grip on the corporate market.
sincerely hope it does but doubt it will
Interesting they call this "live" now, TechCrunch has been running on WordPress.com's "VIP" platform since early 2010.
Oh wow. This is big news. WP is a well-known CMS in North America. Coming up with a hosted cloud solution is big as well.