WordPress VIP hosting for the rest of us…

By Mark Sutton Tuesday, 9th February 2010

As you may have read, TechCrunch, a blog focused on profiling and reviewing internet products, was hacked a couple of weeks ago.

They were using Rackspace's hosting service, but if you run a traceroute on the TechCrunch domain you'll see that it's now pointing to wordpress.com. Even more of a giveaway, they have changed the hosting tag in the footer of their site, so it now says, "Powered by WordPress.com VIP".

Make that Change?

It's easy to understand why a web site like TechCrunch would have knee jerk reaction to their site being compromised and change host. They're a large company who have been operating since 2005, have built a large following, and have expanded into Japan as well as focusing on specific parts of the internet market, such as mobile, hardware, and new startups.

But why change to WordPress VIP?

WordPress VIP

WordPress.com VIP hosting is aimed at businesses with a high profile, or new start ups that have gained the interest of wordpress.com. They consider you a good candidate for VIP hosting if your receiving around 1 million views of your blog a month. They host your site across 1000 servers in three different data centres, and offer the obligatory 24/7 support, as well as hourly backups and various other generic features, (spam protection, site map, etc...)

The description of this hosting product actually says, "Because of the nature of this program it is not open to the public", and they're not joking; prices start at $500 per blog per month with an initial start up fee of $1,500 per blog, and that's for non-dedicated hosting!

Note: this service is on invite only, wordpress.com sign you up at their discretion.

Clearly, this type of package is not for everybody, so at CatN we've created a service to compete with wordpress.com but at a much more reasonable price.

Why CatN VIP?

CatN VIP WordPress hosting really is for everybody. Our product is suitable for a personal blogger, a new startup or an established WordPress site, due to our flexible pricing structure and easy horizontal scalability. Everyone pays for the base package at £25 per month, giving 100 GB data transfer allowance, and over use is charged on a per GB basis, so you only ever pay for what you use. If a customer is regularly going over their allowance then we'll contact them directly to arrange a more suitable package, aiming to keep their costs down.

The same goes for our support. Every customer receives 24x7x365 on site engineer support to deal with platform problems that may occur. We also offer a premium support package which can be arranged on request, (support@catn.com), and will be priced and planned to suit the size of the users requirements, again, ensuring the customer is only paying for what they really need. Our support package is for anyone who needs help or peace of mind running their WordPress site, and can be built for absolute beginners needing a helping hand, or corporate users wishing to improve site performance.

We don't use a hybrid grid system to host your site. We have developed a secure mod_php system that is more secure than the standard php shared hosting setup. Our lead techie, Mark Sutton, has gone into great depth about our secured system, have a look at his blog post here for more information.

Most importantly, when you receive spikes in traffic after you blog has been linked on digg, or stumble upon, etc, we guarantee to still be serving requests under a 20th of a second.

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