The most recent site to be accepted into WordPress VIP hosting is TechCrunch. This is a huge tech source that gets millions of uniques per month, so this is a huge win for the WordPress.com VIP hosting team.
I checked with one of my sources on the WordPress VIP team and they confirmed that it made the move today.
TechCrunch.com has an Alexa ranking of under 400, which means they are doing a lot of traffic and need a platform that can support that. TechCrunch uses WordPress and they were using Super Cache prior to the move, but I can see they are using batcache right now. Similar to W3 Total Cache, batcache uses memcache to store it’s cache and delivers it directly from memory — which is faster than the filesystem itself.
Something to note, batcache is written by one of the WordPress developers, Andy Skelton. This helps ensure that the plugin is written to the best spec possible and that the WordPress.com team would allow it to run on their servers.
A huge congrats to the WordPress.com VIP hosting team for this huge win!
This is represents is HUGE. In time the whole web design industry will be soo simplified that anyone can do it (most can now, they just dont know it). Great for WP to get this deal.
Cheers,
Mukul
To add I am sure others will follow soon to this model.
Cheers,
Mukul
Mmh .. ve heard good stuff about w3 total! supercache also .. but batcache ?? .. Seems to be a great one, if techcrunch is gonna use it now!
Batcache is a much older plugin, but they use it as a standard on the wordpress.com network, for VIP hosted sites.
There is room for improvement, I feel, on the caching side of things, to make them even just a little bit more speedy for visitors, but they do a great job as it is right now.