vip

A successful blog presents unique challenges. Whether it’s a blog all about hard news or funny pets, once you’ve hit the big time, just keeping your blog going can be a full-time job. And you’ve already got one.

Recently on the WordPress Publisher Blog

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. The problem is compounded because many of these new publishers support themselves through advertising, where every minute of downtime translates to dollars lost.

As a result of building and running WordPress.com, we’ve solved these problems. We’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours, and the proof is in the pudding: on any given day we do millions of page views and tens of millions of hits. Digg and Slashdot don’t even make a blip. Most pages are served 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 Diego and backups are made hourly.

Based on our experience running blogs for folks like CNN’s Political Ticker, Dow Jones’ All Things D, Fox’s GretaWire, The New York Times’ The Moment, Time Inc’s The Page, People Magazine’s StyleWatch Off the Rack, famous bloggers like Dan Lyons (formerly known as Fake Steve Jobs), Om Malik, and Robert Scoble, official blogs for communities like Flickr and Second Life, and many other high-profile and high-traffic blogs using WordPress.com, we’ve put together something we’re calling “VIP Hosting” which allows these folks to piggyback on our WordPress.com infrastructure, getting the benefits of what we’ve built.

Because of the nature of this program it is not open to the general public, it is intended for existing high-profile publishers, or startups that we have a good deal of confidence in. You may be a good candidate for VIP hosting if, for example, you get more than 500,000 pageviews a month on your blog. Pricing begins at $500/month per blog with a one-time setup fee of $600, but may be flexible depending on your circumstances or 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. You can send us an email at vip-2009@wordpress.com if you’d like to apply.

How it works

  • You create WordPress.com accounts and import your content.
  • Edit your templates via Subversion.
  • Point the records for your domain name at your new WordPress.com VIP blog.
  • We load balance your site across our hundreds of servers.
  • No restrictions on ads, Javascript, etc.
  • You can run most plugins (that don’t modify DB tables).

What you get

  • 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.
  • Integration with My Comments, Tag Surfer, and avatars
  • Enterprise-level Akismet spam protection
  • Inclusion in our Blogs of the Day, which can drive a great deal of traffic.
  • Free promotion of your new blogs on our Publisher Blog.
  • Sitemap and News Sitemap for better search engines and Google News exposure.

What we ask in return

  • A “Powered by WordPress.com VIP” link on your site.
  • A few standard hooks in your template for our centralized stats.
  • Your tags go into and point to our Tags community.