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Did Techcrunch Become a WordPress VIP?
A couple of weeks ago, technology blog Techcrunch was hacked. At the time of the hacking they were using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service as their hosting provider.
Today I noticed that everything on Techcrunch is now pointing to WordPress.com. If you run a traceroute of the techcrunch.com domain, it points to WordPress. Images and static files (e.g. s3.wordpress.com/wp-content/themes/vip/tctechcrunch) are also hosted by WordPress. Most likely this means that Techcrunch has moved off of the Rackspace Cloud Service and has become a VIP customer. GigaOm is another popular blog that is also hosted on the WordPress VIP service.
Assuming I am right and Techcrunch has moved to WordPress.com for hosting, it’s interesting how short of a time they were hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. I have pinged a couple of Rackspace employees and will update this story once I get any further details.
Update: I can now confirm that Techcrunch has moved to WordPress VIP hosting as noted in their footer. Rackspace employee Robert Scoble has also confirmed the move in the comments. It will be interesting to see if they continue to run the Rackspace advertisement going forward. It does appear the other sites in the Techcrunch family are still hosted on Rackspace – they could be in the process of moving.
CenterNetworks is currently hosted on the Rackspace Cloud Sites service (we pay full price, actually lately we’ve paid a lot more than the base rate). I’ve never posted a full accounting of all of the good and bad of using the Rackspace Cloud Sites service. Alison Gianotto posted an open letter to Rackspace management last month. In January Rackspace raised their Cloud Sites base pricing by 50% for new customers.
So much for being a VIP!
[...] this outage comes just 10 days after the technology blog Techcrunch moved to the WordPress VIP program. Top tech blog GigaOM, also hosted on the WordPress VIP program is also [...]
[...] their various content embeds, like CrunchBase. With Google’s help, I saw that CenterNetworks wrote a post on 2/8 where they asked and got confirmation that TC is indeed hosted at WP.com, so it looks like they [...]
Robert Scoble was moaning about wordpress when his site got hacked. The fact that he is an employee of rackspace provides some insight into his opinion and his attempt to blame wordpress. The truth is Robert Scoble only has himself to blame for his site getting hacked.
A VIP WordPress.com account has great value in its link juice and tag referral system alone. Obviously it offers better security than trying to manage a big site yourself on a cloud service.
Well considering they had sponsorship from RS, i have a feeling it wasnt a cost based decision. It also comes very close after having been hacked recently – and all they moved was wordpress – maybe they just dont want the WP maintenance headache.
Seems to be more of a Cost /Benifit equation rather then a security issue !
Just my 2 cents
Some of Techcrunch’s sites remain on Rackspace like Crunchbase, but yes, main Techcrunch has moved to WordPress and we wish them well there.
Robert,
Can you give us any more details as to why Techcrunch has partly moved away from Rackspace?
Thanks Robert – can you provide any info as to the reasoning for their decision or if their other sites will be moving as well? (I’m guessing you can’t share but have to try since I am too a customer)
Allen: I can’t comment on customers or their decisions without their written consent (this is Rackspace policy), sorry. I was just confirming what can be seen in public anyway.
No problem I understand. Had to try :)