

Techcrunch moves from Rackspace to Wordpress Hosting - somethingrand
http://www.centernetworks.com/techcrunch-wordpress-vip-hosting

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gkoberger
WordPress VIP hosting has its pros and cons.

They handle everything, which makes keeping a site up even easier than using
RackSpace. Their support team is very knowledgeable about WordPress, which is
a huge plus.

However, they take an Apps Store approach- they review every line of code. (I
even once had Matt Mullenweg himself show up on a few commits; he changed the
use of "Wordpress" in a few comments to the proper "WordPress")

This is problem. Their server is quirky- they have a lot of extra, mostly
undocumented code (code that isn't part of WordPress), as well as some weird
PHP settings. So, it wasn't rare for changes (that were thoroughly tested on
our dev site) to break the site for no apparent reason. It would take a few
hours to a few days to get the changes reverted.

~~~
fnid2
This is to be expected from an abstraction layer. WordPress hosting is really
a lot of abstraction layers that facilitate communication between bloggers and
communities and it does a lot of that. One of the things wordpress hosting
abstracts is server management, which Rackspace _also_ does, though not
specifically _for_ wordpress.

There are lots of processes running on the machines and if someone uploads
malicious code or bad performing code, it could be detrimental to other blogs
on the same machine or machines or sets of machines which may even be managed
by Rackspace, who knows, and databases all working together. Systems at that
scale are constantly evolving to fend off hackers from within the wordpress
community and outside it. From within the network and beyond the firewall.

Rackspace has their own set of problems lower in the stack than wordpress.
Lower in the stack than any application specific code, be it within
wordpress's open source or a JavaScript library, a custom website for a mobile
phone or image processing.

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seldo
A friend's startup used Rackspace Cloud for all of two weeks. It's a really
strange product. It pretends to be a cloud service but it's really just Yet
Another Shared Host, only more expensive. After their account got suspended
without notification for exceeding their "processor cycles" limit (wtf?) they
bailed.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
we used them for publictivity. though they say they could scale, they couldn't
handle what we had for our duplicate contacts processing algorithm. Everytime
it would run, we started to get: no suitable nodes to serve your request. I
took this as: "we can't scale to meet your demand".

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tlrobinson
Wordpress' business model:

1\. Write horribly insecure free/open source blog software. Become massively
popular.

2\. Wait for peoples' blogs to start getting hacked. Users then realize they
can't / don't want to keep up with the alarmingly frequent vulnerabilities /
patches, and turn to wordpress.com to handle hosting.

3\. Profit!

~~~
modoc
For the last couple of years, you can just click an "Upgrade" link in your
admin and it just upgrades itself painlessly. It also lets you know in the
admin Dashboard when there's a new version out to upgrade to. Honestly it
seems like they've gone out of their way to make it easy for self hosted users
(like myself) to keep current.

~~~
jonknee
If you're willing to allow FTP connections and create an account for WordPress
to fix itself sure. But I'm not willing to support FTP and also not trusting
that WP can't be hacked in a manner that will either then cough up my FTP
details or download a hacker's copy of WP.

~~~
buro9
You could just run it from SVN and periodically go in and upgrade.

I host and keep 6 blogs up to date like this for friends and together with
things like mod_security I've never had a problem with spam or being hacked.

I realise this is just anecdotal and isolated, but an upgrade doesn't get much
simpler than "svn up".

~~~
9oliYQjP
I know people that use a similar approach (albeit) with git. Comments are
hosted on Disqus so the entire site is essentially read-only. WPSuperCache is
used on a staging server and the actual public-facing website serves up static
pages that have been git pulled from the cache. The Apache process on the
public-facing server only has read permissions to the public site files.

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aditya
Interestingly, gigaom.com is hosted on wordpress.com as well. Makes sense if
you're looking to outsource admin and security for a large blog, really.

~~~
dotBen
GigaOm is funded by TrueVentures, and Automattic (WordPress's company trading
name) is also TrueVentures back, with one of their partners working as the
full-time CEO.

It's not surprising GigaOm is so tightly integrated into Wordpress.com - it's
more surprising a competitor like TC now is.

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joshfinnie
I noticed this today. Seems to be only the main website and not the subsites
like TechCrunchEU.

I wish they would explain more why they made this move. For a tech website, I
didn't even know what Wordpress VIP was and had to look it up myself.

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dotBen
There's actually a lot of discussion at the moment on the security of
RackSpace Cloud Sites product. A lot of the exploits we've seen have focused
around WordPress because it's probably the most common use of an RS Cloud
Sites account rather than anything specifically vulnerable in WP.

[http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/01/wordpress-to-be-
currentl...](http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/01/wordpress-to-be-currently-
considered-unsafe/) and also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077311>

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rubyrescue
Where does Wordpress host? And what is their support like? And how big do you
really have to be to get admitted behind the velvety-php rope?

~~~
joshfinnie
Not sure when this started, but you can get the information on Wordpress's VIP
services here: <http://vip.wordpress.com/>

~~~
rubyrescue
So if you pay $15,000/yr you still only get two-day response time? Seems like
only the Platinum/Black with "high priority" support seems to be worth it...
assuming you have the traffic that makes 80/150k per year worth the cost.

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dnsworks
When you outsource your core competency, what value do you actually have left?
What is this, the 4th "we're going to throw a hissy fit at our hosting
company" that Arrington has done because he can't be bothered to learn how to
replicate a simple blog?

~~~
enki
i didn't realize that hosting wordpress was techcrunch's core competency. i
assumed that's what wrodpress did.

~~~
aditya
Right. Their core competency is tech journalism. Not technology.

~~~
mgrouchy
Is that even their core competency? j/k

