Speculation: The production of this page was likely handled by Marketing, which functionally likely sits in a different org within FB and doesn't have access to many eng resources. So, Marketing sees WP VIP as an easy way to get a site up by just running a credit card. Speaking from experience, I think this "outsourcing" is probably good – if there's indeed no engineering team dedicated to Marketing needs like this.

That said, I'm sure WP VIP will break down when Marketing's needs increase – such as when Marketing needs to do internationalization, or perform a timed launch of a new site/content update.

Because it's a one page website that you can have an intern do in about one or two days?

Probably because there's no one at Facebook or no infrastructure that is specifically setup for hosting stuff like this. Facebook is a product company, not a hosting company, so this makes perfect sense.

I work in the marketing department of a late stage technology start up and we face the same problem. We have lots of excellent people all over the company, but it's a tradeoff in terms of asking people to work on Wordpress hosting infra vs. just paying a service like Wordpress VIP to handle it.

I'm actually wondering the same thing. Have you seen the hosting cost? $10,000/month avg. Clearly they can handle traffic themselves. What's the advantage here?

Who knows. Maybe this was put together last minute with little coordination with engineering.