VIP Support for Webhosts is very good news. Something along theses lines is the only realistic way to prevent all the ridiculous problems that large webhosts were having with WordPress earlier this year.

It is not that hard to keep WordPress running smoothly and a personal one-to-one connection with someone knowledgeable in Automattic, along with actual onsite work, training and auditing should ensure that the giant webhosts stop making dumb mistakes and giving WordPress a bad reputation.

Is a quarter of a million per year too much?

It depends. I see the trend towards all Webhosting essentially becoming WordPress hosting increasing. If a giant webhost can state that their provision of WordPress is "Automattic certified", that will be a valuable competitive edge. Frankly, they also seem to NEED the help - I recently set up WordPress for a client on Godaddy and was shocked by how needlessly messy and time-consuming the process was and that was on an account specifically sold as "WordPress hosting"!

I would have imagined that a company as massive as Godaddy, with presumably millions of hosting customers, would have got WordPress done to a fine art but no, they really haven't.

So, what Automattic are selling is on-call expertise, marketable certification and, effectively, the "official" endorsement of certain webhosts over others.

The most important thing to notice is the requirement that "Each of your hosted WordPress installations must include the Jetpack and VaultPress plugins" - keep a very close eye on Jetpack, it is going to open the door to all sorts of interesting, revenue-generating things in the near future but, right now, the mandatory inclusion of VaultPress will allow Automattic to harvest some revenue directly from end-users. I would not be at all surprised to hear that, in some cases, the hosts get the VIP Support for Webhosts service for free for allowing this and possibly even get a cut of each VaultPress sale to one of their customers.

Today's announcement goes some way towards explaining yesterday's mysteriously disappointing pricing for VaultPress Multisite - keeping the notional value of each and every VaultPress instance as high as possible will give Automattic more room to manoeuvre when negotiating with the webhosts.

As for WP Engine's pricing, $49 is not that much when compare it to the $40 per month that VaultPress Premium costs - people are clearly willing to pay quite a lot for peace-of-mind - but the hidden catch with all their packages is that you will run through your pageview cap long before anything else. Having a CDN and all the other fancy stuff is a bit of a joke if you are effectively limited to an average of 70 views per hour, including all the page refreshes that a lively comments discussion generates.