In a move that will no doubt put pressure on competing blog platforms TypePad (from Six Apart) and Blogger (from Google), WordPress (from Automattic) is boosting free storage for all the blogs it hosts from 50 MB to 3 GB. Founder Matt Mullenweg notes that is three times as much free space as Blogger currently offers, and that you’d have to pay $300 a year to get as much storage on TypePad. The increase is made possible because WordPress uses Amazon’s S3 storage service, and it is passing on increased efficiencies on to its customers.
This is a big deal. Free storage is the new arms race in online services. Blogger and TypePad will have to respond to remain competitive. It also goes to show how Web-scale infrastructure can benefit consumers directly.
(WordPress/Automattic won both the “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best CEO” categories at the Crunchies on Friday).
WordPress/Automattic founded in 2007?? Or were those categories exempt from the year?
Anyway, I’m curious to see what happens with S3. More places are coming out with similar offerings, such as (mt).
I agree this is a very big deal especially in light of the many other standard features and plugins.
Although, having said that, many of the 114 million blogs being tracked by Technorati are small blogs…those on WordPress may not even care.
Wow… WordPress is really on a mission to dominate the entire blogging platform industry… they are fantastic and I use them everywhere I can… great company and product!
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
While that is great to hear, it is not enough to convince me to move away from Blogger.
Although I have used WordPress.com (as well as .org which IMHO kicks everyone’s butt), Blogger is giving users the ability to upload unlimited (in theory) videos to ones site–and I am not talking about using either YouTube or Google Video or another third party.
Not to mention the ability to customize templates for free (last I checked you had to pay a small fee for this).
I do hope WordPress will at least meet the latter end, as you can always outsource the video elsewhere. JMOH (just my honest opinion).
This is another great reason why Wordpress deserved to win the Crunchies Award. They’re doing good things!
Also, thanks to everyone that gave best wishes to http://www.stickychicken.com for our upcoming launch on Wednesday, January 23rd. Stay tuned…
Not to mention the ability to customize templates for free (last I checked you had to pay a small fee for this).*
*Reference to paying to customize wordpress.com templates, just to clarify for everyone reading this.
“The increase is made possible because WordPress uses Amazon’s S3 storage service, and it is passing on increased efficiencies on to its customers.”
It should probably be noted that the ‘efficiences’ are in deployment and management of the extra space, not pure $/GB efficiences. In fact, Matt has said publicly that using S3 is costing them a lot more money for disk space than if they did it themselves:
http://photomat.../10/09/s3-news/
I knew it and great news specially for me (as a wordpress lover). WordPress will upgrading their service day by day.
I specially love their quick supporting service.
Thanks WordPress.
Erick Thanks to share with us.
Storage is the new arms race? Hmm. If you bought a $6.99 GoDaddy hosting plan and installed your own instance of WordPress (or any other blog software), you’d get 100 GB of storage. To get the same amount of storage from Automattic, you’d have to pay how much? The answer is totally irrelevant to most users, who’ll never even reach the 100MB – 1GB storage limits on TypePad’s consumer accounts. Matt says more storage allows people to blog rich media – but many of his customers already do, by embedding files from Flickr/YouTube/etc.
Storage alone won’t make hosted WordPress a more attractive platform than Blogger and TypePad. Automattic doesn’t allow users to accept ads or embed javascript widgets. Those drawbacks far outweigh the benefit of additional web space.
Hey, that’s awesome!
who need 3 gig for a blog’s storage?
it’s like when a pot or pan comes with a lifetime warranty – do you really think you will use that pot or pan for 60 yrs?
good move… maybe just a step before a major announcement?…
AllenStern, like all predictably annoying naysayers, who naysay everything, you lack enough imagination to be able to comment with any authority.
Think about it for a second. If you self-host the images to your blog, and upload 5 1-meg images for a blogpost about some photos you took — you’ve wasted 5 megs. You can do that 9 more times. EVER.
Or you can host your pictures elsewhere, and make everything much more complicated (what if you move them? are you prepared to update all your URLs to hundreds of old blogposts)? Some people prefer integrated picture uploading, others don’t.
But now it’s a true option that is a sustainable-for-life option, whereas before — 50 megs is NOT going to cut it for a life’s worth of blogging.
People shouldn’t have to state the obvious. But maybe you didn’t know that because you don’t use wordpress? In which case, you are definitely NOT the authority.
This reminds me when Yahoo! mail kept expanding its memory, though this was before Gmail. Pretty soon they’ll all have unlimited memory (for blogs), though it will be in the far future.
Unfortunatlly, I don’t have anything interesting to contribute.
#13 – thanks, I am not sure where in my post I noted that 50 mb was good – I did note that 3gb wasn’t needed.
For me, it’s nothing but a PR thing. The total number of people truly interested in that announce might be the few hundreds that considered themselves or are considered as influencers.
Interesting to note though, in the blog posting on the wordpress site announcing the upgrade you still can’t upload videos unless you pay for the extra storage.
“You still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies,…”
So my 3Gb storage can be used for anything except video and whatever “certain file types” are.
If Typepad doesn’t follow within a few months, when my annual payment comes up, I’ll move to WordPress.
I am not using wordpress although I was considering it. I am sure that at least blogger is going to respond. Google responds don’t they?:)
I don’t think it will make anyone move from existing blog to wordpress blog except new blog.
Mostly PR, though pretty positive and encouraging. Great move.
Isabel seems to have the only critical comment on this post:
Matt says more storage allows people to blog rich media – but many of his customers already do, by embedding files from Flickr/YouTube/etc.
I agree that rich media like flash videos is better done by Youtube & Vimeo.
For images, many people still prefer to have it on their site instead of flickr (I mostly do).
For PDFs, the red headed stepchild of the web for documents. I can only think of uploading to the server for sharing to readers on a website.
I am 100% regarding:
Storage alone won’t make hosted WordPress a more attractive platform than Blogger and TypePad.
This doesn’t affect me much personally, since I was only using 2% of my storage allowance before the increase. But it did prompt me to do some comparisons between wp.com and TypePad:
http://changing...orage-and-more/
I wish we could see a stat on how much space people actually typically use.
Speaking of personal blogging, I’ve been lovin tumblr lately. We will definately stick with WP for our main blog though.
> WordPress (from Automattic) is boosting free storage for all the blogs it hosts from 50 MB to 3 GB. Founder Matt Mullenweg notes that is three times as much free space as Blogger currently offers.
If I do my maths correctly, it means that Blogger has been offering 1GB to its user. Compare this to the previous “50MB” from Wordpress. That makes a 20x difference. There’s no big deal offering “only” 3 times the amount of storage.
IMHO, storage is definitely not a competitive advantage for blogging platforms. It’s nice to have more than 50 megs, but more space doesn’t mean better service. I do think Wordpress.com kicks Blogger’s ass by just being a better blogging platform.
That´s great. I used storage from other places, but it´s better to have it all unified.
With no disrespect to any of the “professional” bloggers, using a “free” blog service for more than a recipe or cat blog is a bad idea no matter how much storage you get.
Hosting your own server using Wordpress scripting is a different story but most self-hosted WP blogs I’ve seen are just as pathetically plain looking as the next.
No matter how many page-views or visitors a Blogger blog may get, the very name connotes amateur hobbyist and for the most part, the alleged aesthetics WP claims to provide are laughable.
A “free” blogger has no right or expectation to continued service and the “free” provider has no obligation to provide it.
Six Apart’s TypePad is not being “left in the dust” by anyone. Blogger? Who cares. *yawn*
Rock on, ROCK ON!
Wordpress has been, currently is, and always will be the BEST! Matt has great direction for the product and the driving force behind it is SOLID.
No podcasting? really?
I just tried to upload an mp3 on my free wordpress.com account and was directed to this message:
What filetypes can I upload?
Currently you can upload the following files to your blog: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt.
With the space upgrade you can also upload: mp3, avi, ogg, m4a, mp4, mpg, mov, wav, and wmv.
So this “upgrade” is useless to me. And it doesn’t offer “free” space for my intended use.
Vox has unlimited storage. You are restricted to uploading 2gb per month so in 6 weeks you can upload to Vox what you’re max is for Wordpress. Vox and Blogger are better at 3rd party apps/widgets than Wordpress. Wordpress has a neat product but it’s going to take a lot more than 3gb to make it stand out above the rest of the crowd…
3Gb for a blog? Get outta here. I’ve been heavily blogging for a year and I’m not even vaguely nearing the same ballpark of requiring that much storage space.
It’s press release material, not grounded in the real world – for most bloggers, at least.
“This is a big deal. Free storage is the new arms race in online services. ” – wrong. this is not a big deal at all. its just a marketing ploy. storage is cheap and if you do some clever back office linking you can save space when storing a popular file. Note that wordpress doesn’t allow you to upload zip and other “big” files so the PR could have easily been “wordpress boosts free storage to 30GB”.
Blogger offers unlimited free storage for text and video. Only pictures are subject to a 1 GB limit because it is powered by Picasa Web Albums.
>> Automattic doesn’t allow users to accept ads or embed javascript widgets. Those drawbacks far outweigh the benefit of additional web space. <<
My thoughts exactly.
How much blogger storage size actually ?
good news, worpress no 1
yes this is good news, but it would be great if blogger increased its storage to remain competitive. 1GB is not that much if you want to display a whole bunch of images on your blog and the prices for extra storage are simply ridiculous! Google, please,please please fix this!