Thursday, September 14, 2017

Wordpress.com VIP Review - Sites are not so VIP, suffer from poor performance

With Toronto International Film Festival in full swing a great deal of attention has been place movie news, I have been visiting Variety (the voice of Hollywood) and the National Post (a Toronto based paper) websites to get my buzz fix and just started getting irritated because they were so slow. So I got to the bottom of this.

Seems Variety, National Post and other sites CNN, UPS are jumping on the band wagon of using a hosting service by Wordpress.com called Wordpress VIP, promising "Top-notch cloud hosting, support, and guidance" according to https://vip.wordpress.com/ site.

Wordpress.com VIP Annoying Issues

An annoying problem that Wordpress.com still has not fixed, is if you own a site at Wordpress.com you get a black bar that will appear on each Wordpress VIP hosted site (see images below).

A black bar at the top will appear which contains MySite, Reader and Write which seems to suggest you can write an article for Variety or the National Post and therefore any Wordpress VIP hostes sites. LOL

It's just annoying and get it fixed, it's been this way for years.














Another way to to identify sites hosted with Wordpress VIP is by scroll to the bottom of the page and look for "Powered by WordPress.com VIP" branding.

Wordpress.com VIP Performance Review

One word - sucks. Wordpress.com VIP performance is staggeringly poor and slow, considering this is their raison d'etre earning a F in Pagespeed score and F in YSlow Score.

Moreover, poor management (MBAs) at those institutions whose grasp of technology is limited and heard mentality are to blame. It was someone's choice and a poor one. Incredibly surprising since these are public facing news sites and it's all about customer engagement and retention. Tsk. Tsk.











































WordPress VIP Costs

WordPress VIPs pricing structure is actually very simple. They charge a one-time setup fee of $15,000 and then $2,500 per month for

Up to 5 sites
Unlimited traffic
Unlimited bandwidth
Unlimited storage
From there, you must choose a support package with pricing from $1,250 to $20,850 per month! 








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