S3 News

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Three bits of Amazon S3 news:

  1. We’re now using S3 as the primary storage for WordPress.com, rather than just for backups. We have some layers in front of it, notably Varnish, so the majority of our serving doesn’t hit S3. Still, our AWS bill went from around $200/mo to $1500/mo, and rising. It has simplified some of our requirements, but doesn’t look like it’ll save any money.
  2. Amazon now has a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Big companies like this, but in the real world I’ve found there to be a low correlation with service reliability and the presence of a SLA.
  3. In the Amazon newsletter they promoted Content Spooling Network as a good use of their services. Unfortunately, the service appears to be tailored for using Mechanical Turk to “ghostwrite keyword-based articles for SEO,” or more succinctly, “spam.” Get a web-savvy editor for that newsletter, guys!

London / FOWA WordPress Meetup

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As per the comments on my last post the WordPress London Meetup will be on Thursday October 4th right after the PHP London meetup. The venue is called The Old Crown and it looks like the perfect spot, it even has wifi. I have to take the DLR from the Docklands into town so I’m planning to be there at 9 PM, which is when the PHP presentations should be finishing up and we can stage a WordPress invasion. If someone could post DLR / Tube instructions to get there from the Excel Center where FOWA is I think a lot of people would appreciate it.

WordPress.com Rising

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WordPress.com is now the number #22 site in the US according to Quantcast, just ahead of craigslist.org. Moving up from there is going to be a lot harder as the US uniques get pretty big. Note that the numbers Quantcast uses for its top-list only includes blogs with “wordpress.com” in the URL. To see our aggregate stats which includes blogs with custom domains you have to look at the WordPress network page, which has us at 87 million global uniques in the past 30 days, up from 70 million just over a month ago.

Paris and London WordPress Meetups

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I’m going to be in Europe next week to speak at the Future of Web Apps in London, and I’ll be spending a few days in Paris beforehand. I’d love to meet up with WordPress-minded folks in both. Let’s do a Paris meetup on Sunday, September 30th and one in London on Tuesday the 2nd or Thursday the 4th. Leave a comment (with your email) if you can make it and we’ll nail down the details in the next day or two.