WordPress VIP Hosting

WordPress.com formally announced it’s plan to get serious with the blog hosting business and is now offering VIP Hosting for premium bloggers/publishers.

Based on our experience with high-profile and high-traffic bloggers using WordPress, 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 without the limitations of a free WordPress.com account around theme editing and javascript.

Here’s how it works:

• You create WordPress.com accounts, import your content, and point your DNS at us.
• We load balance your site across our dozens of servers.
• You can have your own domain name.
• All of your administration will be over SSL, which means no one can sniff your password.
• 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. (Also gives you free integration with our My Comments, Tag Surfer, and avatar features.)
• Included Akismet spam protection.
• Inclusion in our top lists, which can drive a great deal of traffic.
• You will have the ability to edit your templates via Subversion (SVN).
• You can run most plugins (that don’t modify DB tables).
• There are no restrictions on ads, javascript, etc.

What do we ask in return?

• A “Powered by WordPress.com” logo on your site.
• A few standard hooks in your template for our centralized stats.
• Your tags go into and point to our Tags community.
• $500PHP 29,343INR 42,375EUR 476CNY 3,639 to setup your site and $250PHP 14,671INR 21,187EUR 238CNY 1,820 a month.

The $250PHP 14,671INR 21,187EUR 238CNY 1,820 might be too much though but if you’re concerned about uptime (99.9999%), backups, scalability and multiple redundancy, then the cost is justifiable. That same amount can also get you a decent dedicated server with backups but that’s all. I guess that’s what you’d call premium real estate.