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Comment by cmwelsh | Hacker News Reader

If you have $500/month to spend you could also get equivalent managed PHP hosting (that's all this is) from many other providers like RackSpace Cloud, etc. with spare money left over for an update service like ManageWP.

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Enterprise runs on WP.com infrastructure (multi-datacenter, tens of thousands of CPU cores, terabytes of memory) so it's able to absorb traffic levels above what most cloud hosts can. The trade-off is you have less flexibility to modify stack than you would with a VPS or cloud hosting account.

You can probably get cheaper options than almost every Enterprise offering that's ever been made. However, they usually guarantee things like uptime, support response and updates that self-controlled hosting doesn't.

The "managed" hosting you're referring to typically means the NOC will troubleshoot services that are down or not working correctly with default settings. They won't, however, help you optimize your server or help with ANY code.

So if this WordPress offering provides the least bit of service for server/code optimization, then they're way ahead of the hosting game. But as you can see, it comes at a significant cost.

But there are also managed hosting companies specifically for WordPress, which offer pre-configured servers, optimized WordPress installs and WordPress related support. Most of these companies have custom solutions that are suitable for enterprise customers. A couple of them, such as BlogDroid or Pagely, will even help customers solve issues with their code's performance.

You are also getting WP support from folks that know the codebase really well. $500 for managed hosting with CDN and unlimited bandwidth? That's a great deal for any large publication.

But it sounds like with this you also get support for your WP site - which could be a good deal depending on your needs

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