Scott Porad

When a good portion of your revenue is running on WordPress.com servers, this is not a tweet that causes my heart to go pitter-patter:

Recently, WordPress.com was down for almost two hours.  Dave Moyer, the host of WordCast, interviewed me about the outage, how it affected our business and my thoughts about WordPress.com going forward.  You can listen to the interview, and I’ll outline my thoughts here:

• We continue to be very supportive of WordPress.com and view them as an excellent partner.  I recommend WordPress all the time without hesitation.
• I did not view this as a serious issue because WordPress has a history of outstanding reliability.  (OMG!  Did I just jinx them?)  The last outage of this magnitude was 4 years ago.  In addition to WordPress, we run our own infrastructure and we’ve had at least one outage in the last 2 years, so they’re doing better than us in that regard.  Obviously, if a pattern develops, we would have to review our point of view.
• Yes, we lost revenue that day.  But, if you think about it, that lost revenue is simply part of the cost of the service.  If we wanted an even more reliable service (and by no means is WordPress.com unreliable), then it would cost us significantly more than the amount of revenue we lost that day.
• Why do we use WordPress.com?  Simply put, it’s cheaper.  It might not be cheaper cash-wise, but when you look at the total cost of ownerhship it’s way cheaper.
  • First, we’d have to own and manage all that infrastructure which costs money and management overhead.
  • In addition, we’d have to develop the expertise required to host an extremely large WordPress installation.  WordPress.com already has this expertise.
  • And, there’s the stress of operating a 24/7/365 operation.
  • Most importantly, the opportunity cost of focus and cost distraction.  At the end of the day, Cheezburger benefits from having our full attention focused on building great sites and creating a great community.

For those of you reading this who might not give a hoot about technology or WordPress.com, that final point really is relevant to so much of life.  The opportunity cost of focus and the cost distraction are such critical elements to success.  I wish I had words to express that concept more eloquently; somehow I just feel in my gut that it’s true.