Free Space to Three Gigabytes

January 21, 2008

Matt

Much of the work we do at Automattic is behind the scenes, infrastructure you’ll (hopefully) never notice or see, but we’re always thinking about how the improvements we make to the foundation of the site will allow us to build more interesting things on top of it.

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

How are we able to do this? Over the past year we’ve developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don’t feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth. We’re ready for you. 🙂

What about the space upgrades? They’re still important. You still need a space upgrade to upload certain file types, like movies, and we’re also increasing the limits of the paid upgrades, so if you bought a 1GB upgrade before it now adds 5GB for no additional charge.

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Thats a really good move. But I wonder where do you get the money from to run this service. Will WordPress blogging be a paid service in future, cos there are rumors that gmail might become a paid service in say about a 2-3 years.

Don’t worry, we wouldn’t offer anything for free that we weren’t confident offering for free for a long time. We still have paid upgrades for additional space, but the 3GB is free, free, free. (And I haven’t heard anything about Gmail being paid, either.)

no way,
if gmail becomes a paid service, why should we bother using instead of the giddy old hotmail?
or if wordpress becomes a paid service, shouldn’t we bloggers rather move to freaky windows live spazes?

Of course, anyone who really needs all that space is going to be very happy, but I
I always used to wonder how long it would have taken me to reach the 50MB limit. After a year of blogging, uploading photos and of course a boatload of text, I reached only 10% of the old limit.

And about videos: now that the space is available to do so, what advantage does a video upload to your blog have over a link to youtube? I would like to try it out.

Yay! I was up to half my free space already! I love it.
Before I signed up for wordpress, I thought all the bloggers proselytizing for it were being paid somehow. Now I understand — it really is the best!

Think there’s anyway we could organize our images? Perhaps add a search feature or tags? I hate having to dig through 59 pages of images trying to find one I know I’ve previously uploaded.

This is great. Im realy excited about this, after only ten days of blogging I was reaching 88% yesterday night but I was justthinking “I cant pay, what should I do?” I even considered ooking at places such as blogsavy but they are so much worse at 25MB. Now you really got me hooked to this place. Thanks!!!