farms

I think non email based notification, or customizable notification, would be a killer.

Looks pretty fancy, any plans for an API / auto upgrade system that you could have sitting server side?

I think your Tiny and our Tiny are clearly quite different ;)

As did we, last week when we published it... I think HN reckons we're spam for some reason, it'd be great to have that erroneous judgement fixed up too if anyone's listening!

Many and numerous backups, but moving ~2m blogs (there's at least 750k splogs that live in dbases but dont show on our numbers) 'aint that easy!

We have about 15-20 self-managed servers.

See my comment re: call I just had with them , hope to be able to report some new policies that'll stop this from happening to their other customers shortly!

BTW, just got off the phone with their GM, really nice guy, sounds like they are definitely going to be fixing this up for us and more generally... mucho relieved.

Will post more details on http://wpmu.org when we have it, at the end it just sounds like a stupid fail of policy (we've all been there) - but it's a shame it had to get to this point to change it.

We've been happy customers of their for years, hopefully now we can continue to be.

We don't, but we will certainly get one, thanks for the pointer...

It's so not link-baity, it's trying to change stuff for the better... I tried emailing them before, they palmed me off and ignored me to such an extent that we didn't have a choice... either go public about it or shuffle off and change hosts at great cost and pains to ourselves.

they could at least have called us!

Good question, and one we've already looked into a fair bit as we already host all of our uploads on Amazon.

Back in the day we figured that it would probably be cheaper and more extensible to use Amazon... however given that things weren't broken, and the amount of time and effort we'd put into our SB setup we decide that it wasn't worth switching.

We're lucky enough to have one of the best SysAdmins in the business, I wouldn't trade him for his weight in gold, but even with him and his assistants working flat out at that the cost and time of moving to another setup would far outweigh the other cost benefit... after all we're pretty freaking big:

http://www.quantcast.com/edublogs.org

So previously that's how we've figured it out... if SB agree that they won't do something like this to us again without first at least making sure they call and speak to us, then we'll probably continue... it just makes sense.

With a bit of luck all this publicity will make them realise how important it is.

For sure, although I think future restrictions would be the key, like a kinda trustworthy index.

The sad thing is that we've been super happy customers of ServerBeach for ages now, they do a great job, but they really shafted us here.

So, as long as they agreed no to do this to ya, I'd heartily recommend them... I'm hoping that we hear that from them shortly too.

It's been a pretty crazy ride, and stupid setup, full story is here: http://wpmu.org/serverbeach-takes-1-45-million-edublogs-offl...

Happy to do any Q&A here too.

lol, meta

Same for Tekstra LTE in OZ, SG3 barely performs above 3G but the iPhone5 I just got is pulling in 57M down and 24MB up!!!

It's also listed in Spamhaus http://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/removal/record/t.co - so it could be someone's filter going nuts over that.

Funny recommendation there:

"If you are an authoritative administrator of t.co and you have solved the abuse issues you can write to us at dbl-mmxi@spamhaus.org from either abuse@t.co or postmaster@t.co and inform us of the actions you have taken to clean up the current spammer URLs. Please also inform us of any steps you have taken to prevent future abuse of your shortener/redirector. We will review your request and, at our discretion, remove the listing or respond to your request."

:)

Oh look, we've made over 140, does that count as HN worthy :/

Lol - must - learn - not - to - feel - upset - just - necessary - experience!

It's one of those things that is really easy to say but really hard to actually understand and put into practice, pretty much literally the only way you learn is through failure, not success.

There's a whole barrage of educational literature and research that backs this up, it's how we all learned to crawl, walk, talk and yadeyadayada... but all to often we beat ourselves up for being wrong, getting things messed up and not achieving perfection.

When in fact we should be celebrating it, I'd love to see a whole conference based around exactly this kinda thing, love it.

lol

Damn fine list, good stuff.

Doesn't make it any less annoying ;)

It'd be nice to have a page + comments somehow.

Freaking ace, guy's a legend!

Having said that, I'd rather get myself strung up in a Judas cradle than work for or with him :D

Hmmm, straight after posting my comment I've been somehow labeled as a spammer :/ Any connection? If someone could untag me so I can share stuff again / participate that'd be great...

Important to differentiate between WordPress (the open source project, owned by everyone, and no-one, technically speaking), WordPress.org (the domain name owned by Matt Mullenweg), 'The WordPress Foundation' (holder of the WP TM, also founded and essentially controlled by Matt) and Automattic (the company, founded by Matt, behind wp.com).

The domain name makes the $s through hosting referrals (although you'd imagine that the wp.com self-hosted referrals have long since blown that outta the water) - no idea how or if that rev is distributed.

Automattic, despite being 'barely for profit' (makes me chuckle that, everytime :) would, by my guess, make the vast amount of it's cash through adwords - they used to not show to FF users as they clicked less but they may have changed that now... regardless, they're managed in such a way that bloggers at wp.com will rarely, if ever see them.

Genius, from back in the day: http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2007/11/21/making-money-with-ads...

However, they have also been aggressively monetizing some of their other offerings like http://akismet.com (go try sign up there for free, also genius), VaultPress (kicked us off a few ad spots that one did!) and, of course, 'upgrades' to wp.com accounts.

And then there's the jetpack trojan horse into self-hosted WP installs:

http://wpmu.org/why-jetpack-reallypacks-a-punch-and-the-futu...

VIP hosting etc. has always been a moneyspinner from day 1.

Anyway, if you want a model of how an open source project can be effectively transformed into a money-making beast, while at the same time retaining (if not enhancing) your humble geek GPL cred, look no further.

You might not necessarily like it, but you can't fail to be impressed.

[not really a disclaimer, more FYI, I'm the CEO of http://incsub.com - we have more than a few WP interests...]

It was all down to woocommerce, clearly ;)

We tried recently tried relatively identical campaigns (few grand into each) for AW and FB for http://premium.wpmudev.org - AW was by far far the winner... can't beat people actually looking for stuff, rather than annoying them while they're trying to socialize!

In my view, that's where FB falls over most of all, they're only fundamentally attractive to agencies looking for 'in your face' rather than 'purpose based' ads... pointless for a highly niche relatively small budget crew like us.

And why goog will kill them in the end :)

They were doing it years ago.

Hoping you guys find this useful, heaps of stuff there that we've put into action at Edublogs and WPMU DEV.