Free 3GB Upgrade on WordPress.com

Matt of Automattic has just announced that it has upgraded all WordPress.com account’s upload quota from 50MB to 3GB. That’s 60 fold increase overnight.

Huge, huge props to Matt/Automattic and great news to all WordPress.com users. Obviously, they’re going the GMail way.

Matt adds that doing a 1GB upgrade on competing service TypePad would set you back about $300PHP 17,606INR 25,425EUR 286CNY 2,183 a year.

Over the past year we’ve developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don’t feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth. We’re ready for you. :)

What about the space upgrades? They’re still important. You still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies, and we’re also increasing the limits of the paid upgrades, so if you bought a 1GB upgrade before it now adds 5GB for no additional charge.

This upgrade is only limited to image and doc uploads only. If you want your audios and movies hosted by WordPress.com, you’ll need to buy credits from them for that. Others might take advantage of this if they have their own hosted blogs — they’ll just host their pictures/images on WordPress.com and hotlink them.

This development wouldn’t be fiscally possible if not for the Amazon S3 service, which means TypePad can also do the same thing later. What’s the Blogger limit on file uploads again? Was it 300MB? Still, IMO, it’s good way to start the competition going.