Cloudup acquired by Automattic | Hacker News Reader

Cloudup acquired by Automattic

cloudup.com

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Next up: WordPress in Node.

(j/k, but looking forward to getting more node.js services running as part of WordPress.com.)

Congratulations guys!

Next up: WordPress in Node.

Can you expand more on this?

https://github.com/visionmedia, one of the most prolific node developers, works for cloudup.

As siong1987 mentioned, Cloudup was previously LearnBoost, creators of socket.io which came from heaven and replaced the horror that was Orbited for real time abstractions around websocket.

I'm happy for them that they ended up at an awesome company.

Was Cloudup a spin-off servic? LearnBoost still seems to be available (https://www.learnboost.com/)

IIRC, they were going to keep LearnBoost running but without continued development on it. I wonder what the acquisition means for LearnBoost though - did Automattic acquire that as well, and if so, what will they do with it?

Just noticed a blog post regarding the announcement on learnboost.com (https://www.learnboost.com/blog/learnboost-automattic/). They mention "LearnBoost’s amazing classroom software will not be changing, and the entire suite of apps will remain free. Aside from ramping up performance enhancements, you’ll enjoy all the wonderful, free services that you’ve come to love. For the most part, it’s business as usual, but we’re excited to have more manpower behind scaling our infrastructure to make sure LearnBoost remains lightning fast and reliable."

I'm getting tired of repeating this every time. WordPress.com does NOT power the 20% of the internet. The open source WordPress project does. WordPress.com represent a small % of all the WordPress installations.

I'd estimate WP.com is about half of all WP installations, maybe more.

This man should know. ;)

> WordPress powers 20% of the Internet (yes, you read that correctly!), meaning they’ve got a ton of experience scaling services

My point is that these two sentences are totally true, but put together like that are misleading. And that's a bit discouraging for the non-automatticians contributing to core.

The article does not include the ".com"

This seems fairly accurate:

http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress

Quantcast Top 10k 1,066 of 10,000 - 10.7%

Quantcast Top 100k 11,664 of 100,000 - 11.7%

Quantcast Top Million 139,502 of 876,201 - 15.9%

BuiltWith Top Sites 408,954 of 1,974,430 - 20.7%

Most of Internet 12,177,314 of 192,744,298 - 6.3%

It's pretty obvious why Automattic acquired Cloudup and it's a one worded competitor: Ghost. With this acquisition Automattic have just obtained some highly talented Node.JS developers who no doubt will be vital to the survival of Wordpress in the coming months and years. This is actually what Wordpress needed, they've become somewhat comfortable in their own skin in many ways.

I think the reality of Ghost being a serious contender in the blogging space forced Automattic's hand here. When a product gets the backing of not one, but two of the most popular companies currently churning out commercial Wordpress themes (Envato's Themeforest and Woothemes) you know you've got a potential fight on your hands. Not to mention the backing of Microsoft, with Internet Explorer being a support partner of Ghost as well.

Could we potentially be seeing a Node.JS powered version of Wordpress in the coming months as well? A more stripped back and super fast interpretation of the blogging software running a NoSQL database and at the same time, give Ghost a run for their money? I certainly hope so, because it would mean I wouldn't have to spend so much time and money scaling Apache/NGINX/MySQL servers all the time because Wordpress likes to chew RAM and smash MySQL databases.

> I think the reality of Ghost being a serious contender in the blogging space forced Automattic's hand here.

I don't think you understand how well entrenched Wordpress is.

> Could we potentially be seeing a Node.JS powered version of Wordpress in the coming months as well?

In case you were wondering, ShitHNSays was shut down by Twitter. So there's no point trying to get syndicated, sorry.

* > I don't think you understand how well entrenched Wordpress is. *

As someone who makes a living from Wordpress, yes I do realise. However, I also realise there is a market for a better alternative to Wordpress for blogging. Medium I think has shown there is a demand for a nicely designed blog application with focus on content.

Have you ever tried scaling Wordpress to thousands of visitors per day before? It takes a whole lot more than installing a caching plugin... Using Wordpress as a blog from a cost perspective is expensive, especially once you install a few plugins to make the overall experience better. A Node.JS powered version of Wordpress would be something I would jump on if it were to ever come to fruition.

Wordpress for use just as a blog nowadays is crazy. You don't install Wordpress if you want a simple blog, you install it if you want a website. It's a CMS, not a blogging platform any more. People are yearning for alternatives, Ghost might not reach the scale of Wordpress and usage stats over night, but I think it will make a splash. It's launch partners (Microsoft, Woothemes, Envato) have a lot of pulling power to get people on board.

* > In case you were wondering, ShitHNSays was shut down by Twitter. So there's no point trying to get syndicated, sorry. *

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I just Googled ShitHNSays and didn't even realise it existed until now. No need for the sarcasm and condescending attitude. Just because you are obviously against people voicing their opinions on subjects you deem yourself to be all knowing about, doesn't give you the right to be a jerk about it.

> Have you ever tried scaling Wordpress to thousands of visitors per day before?

Yes. I've been doing it for almost a decade.

I hate Wordpress. But basically, we're going to be stuck with it for a while. Network effects and path dependency cannot be shifted by a technology that is merely a bit better from the POV of commissioning end-users.

Consider: under what circumstances will the thousands of PHP developers who write the tangled cthulucode which underpins Wordpress and its ecosystem drop everything and simultaneously rewrite the core + thousands of plugins + tens of thousands of themes?

Your remarks are wildly wishful thinking. They remind me of "imagine a beowulf cluster".

See also Matt's recent post on the relaunch of Simplenote:

http://ma.tt/2013/09/on-the-new-simplenote/

Interested to see what TJ and Guillermo would do for Wordpress... considering now there is already a Node.js based competitor (Ghost)

I'm having trouble understanding why a bandwidth bill for 1.5tb is an achievement.

I am thinking it was more for the team, knowing what they are capable of. TJ and Guillermo are very well known developers in the node.js scene. If you ever used node.js for web development, you have used some of their work.

https://github.com/visionmedia https://github.com/guille

Well that was fast.

It took a while. CloudUp was a pivot from LearnBoost which was a product that they had been running for years.

Yep. LearnBoost was incorporated from my dorm room on Jan 4, 2010 - but I had been working on it on my own for months before the incorporation. Then I raised most of our seed round, merged with Guillermo and Thianh... from which we built LB, a huge open source presence in Node.js, tried everything possible to grow on the edtech side, and then launched Cloudup in June 2013

Amazing work on LearnBoost and congratulations on the acquisition! I'm on the PTO board at my son's elementary school and would love to get his school on the LearnBoost platform. Before pitching to the administration, is the platform completely Node.js? Is there a paid support option? Is it self-hosted or hosted on LearnBoost? Do you plan to continue development going forward?

Thanks.

Congrats!

Smart move. I think it's time for Marissa/Tumblr to buy doctape now ;-)

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