WP Engine, a powerful hosted WordPress platform for existing WordPress.org users, has raised $1.2 million in new funding led by Silverton Partners with angels Eric Ries, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling participating. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also made a strategic investment in WP Engine.
WP Engine, which launched in July of 2010, provides a enterprise-level hosting service for WordPress.org users who are tired of managing servers and doing IT work themselves. WP Engine makes sure blogs have super fast page load times, and scale when hit with a ton of traffic.
Additionally, WP Engine provides all customers with a managed CDN for static content delivery, full daily backups, a complimentary staging area, and consultation on themes and plugins. Monthly plans start at $50 per month. In fact, WP Engine now has an install base of over 30,000 personal and professional WordPress blogs.
This round of funding towards scaling the product, for recruiting, and to ramp up partner relations with other elite WordPress service providers.
Today, Automattic also announced VIP Support for Web Hosts, a new partner program for hosting WordPress sites and blogs (WP Engine is the launch partner for the program). VIP Support for Web Hosts includes advanced systems and developer support for infrastructure-wide issues and improvements; annual review of the client’s entire stack as it relates to WordPress hosting; annual security audit and review of best practices and more.
WP Engine is like Heroku for WordPress – fully managed, fast, scalable, secure deployment, coupled with unique tools for developers and power users. The service includes top-notch support (more WordPress experts on staff per 1000 customers than anyone else), one-click backup/restore, optimization for speed and scalability, and security features that include automatic software upgrades. WP Engine allows customers to use any WordPress plugin or theme, including custom code. The platform is ideal for pro-bloggers, for businesses, and also for small dev shops...
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, the simplest, most secure way to start web-publishing immediately on the open source WordPress platform. They also make Jetpack for WordPress, which bundles a number of social improvements to the WordPress core software as a single plugin. Automattic offers a number of products, like VaultPress and Akismet, on a freemium model so anyone can use them for free, and later have the choice to pay extra for premium features. Automattic has over 150 employees, including...
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
