WordPress VIP : Is it a solid rip for the Enterprise

WordPress VIP is luxurious complete solution at high price range. Let us us test WordPress VIP’s performance with non WordPress VIP WordPress. Two years ago, The Blog Helard published an article on this curated service which (said to be) highly selective about their customers and WordPress VIP’s customer :

Let us see how WordPress VIP is doing now !

What is this WordPress VIP ?

Its better to check yourself – vip.wordpress.com. They said to provide WordPress Software as a Service (SaaS) which worth whopping $3750/month (yes, almost double than Rackspace’s best possible server and Media Template’s Nitro ve) or self hosted that starts at $15,000 per year. This Merc like pricing made us curious to check about WordPress VIP.

Performance of WordPress VIP

As we do not have the opportunity (or rather do not have money) to ‘buy’ such luxurious car (read WordPress VIP), we can only think about whether the probability of the grape is towards being sour or not. We are not ‘secured’, we have only few free tools to check a website’s performance – webpagetest.org.

Our own performance

We are poor people, we live on Rackspace’s slum (pun intended), we feel Rackspace give us enough support as slum dwellers, anyway,  the score usually 89 – 91, with average loading time 2.7 seconds on first view and half a minute on repeat view, except cache static content, all are green –

That red F is due to Rackspace Cloud Files / Akamai CDN’s  lack of a specific feature on Control Panel, its not that it can not be increased via API, but its too much painful for an usual busy blog.

Page Speed Specialist Sajal Kayan’s own blog

Quite obviously, it is almost a model –

Charity begins at home : WordPress VIP

We are not joking, its 22 seconds on first load and  Timed Out on repeat view. But the score is really impressive : 94 with one F like us –

WordPress VIP is using EdgeCast CDN and we are using Akamai CDN / Rackspace Cloud Files. But what about any customer of WordPress VIP ?

WordPress VIP TechCrunch

First view 12.170s, repeat 5.4 seconds, score 91, but :

You check the result here.

So, its their average WordPress VIP page speed or rather performance. Among the features of WordPress VIP its written “Site Optimization” is included. We have seen the performance of WordPress VIP, now check the SEO, otherwise they might argue, WordPress VIP wanted to say SEO by  “Site Optimization” not the performance of server. We check at woorank.com. This time we are checked only vip.wordpress.com, it struggled to show anything good that can be physically measured with a score of 58/100. Forget about W3C validity – there is no Meta description present at WordPress VIP’s website.

Security of WordPress VIP

So the only measurable thing remains of WordPress VIP is Bulletproof Security. Yes, the usual loopholes are removed on their own WordPress VIP website. That honestly can be done with a good WordPress Plugin like BulletProof Security. As :

wonko.com wrote many years ago, the statement is still valid – WordPress VIP Hosting is a ripoff.

Update : There is no meaning of opting for WordPress for VIP since 2014, there are Bare Metal servers including Rackspace OnMetal®, which can deliver optimal performance from the best hardware.