Media Temple launches new enterprise WordPress solution hosted on AWS

Media Temple is launching a new enterprise-grade WordPress hosting solution today. That would be interesting by itself, but the twist here is that the company, which is owned by GoDaddy, is hosting this service on AWS.

With this offering, Media Temple is combining its expertise in running WordPress installs with its (mt) One white-glove customer service offering, CloudTech Premier support, and the scalability of Amazon’s cloud computing services.

While it may seem odd for a hosting provider like Media Temple to offer a solution on Amazon’s platform instead of its own, it’s worth noting that the company already offered managed cloud hosting on AWS before.

Enterprise WordPress by MT

“Media Temple’s servers are good, but there are things we can do with Amazon’s technology that you can’t do with a virtual private server,” MediaTemple senior director of product management Brendan Fortune told me. Among these things are AWS tools like Lambda, Amazon’s serverless compute service, and robust support for containers with the EC2 Container Service. Fortune noted how building on top of Amazon’s container management service enables Media Temple to quickly scale a WordPress deployment up and down as needed, for example.

As Fortune stressed, the idea here is to provide users with peace of mind. Subscribers will get a dedicated account manager, for example, who can help solve problems but also work with users pro-actively. The WordPress installs themselves are managed by Media Temple’s CloudTech team, which will use its monitoring systems to watch over these installs.

While Media Temple will obviously also be watching out for security issues and automatically patch these WordPress installs, the service also uses Amazon’s CloudFront DDoS protection.

All of this service does come at a price, of course. While AWS charges on a per-use basis, Media Temple is abstracting all of this away from its users and rolling everything into two plans. The standard enterprise plan costs $2,500 per month comes with support for five sites, one terabyte of cloud storage, 1.5 terabytes of monthly CDN usage, scaling to up to 10 EC2 instances using containers, and support for Amazon’s RDS database. Users who need more can opt for the “max performance” plan, but this plan comes with a bespoke pricing plan as well.

Given this pricing, it’s no surprise MediaTemple is aiming this service at agencies, enterprises and mid-market companies. While the price may seem high, it’s in line with other managed WordPress hosting services like Pagely, which charges a similar price for its high-end plan.

Fortune tells me the team looked at AWS’s competitors like Azure and Google Cloud Platform as well, but in the end opted for AWS because it was already familiar with the technology and because it wanted to use AWS’s container service.