VentureBeat

Automattic, the company that owns the popular Wordpress blogging software platform, has raised $29.5 million from existing investors and a new partner, the New York Times. Some companies had offered to buy it, founder Matt Mullenweg writes.

The San Francisco company started out as an open source code project at WordPress.org, which provided software that anyone could download and then host on their own server (what VentureBeat currently uses). More recently, it also began offering free blog hosting at Wordpress.com (which VentureBeat is planning to switch to), where it also sells a set of premium web services, such as Akismet, its spam-blocking software.

Om Malik has the scoop, including more details on the San Francisco company’s growth over the years.

Today, Wordpress hosts 2.2 million blogs today. Paying Wordpress customers include CNN, Fortune, Fox and the New York Times.

Automattic had a big year in 2007: 1.8 million new registered users joined Wordpress.com, 25 million posts were created, and it grew to reach over 100 million unique users worldwide. Meanwhile, the open source Wordpress.com code has been downloaded 5,880,790 since Automattic started, with 3,852,554 downloads in the past year alone, Mullenweg writes.

The New York Times partnership, besides the investment, includes a plan for the Times to expand its “existing blogging infrastructure” and “create new ways of connecting Wordpress bloggers with the New York Times and its readers,” Automattic chief executive Toni Schneider writes.

The company plans to continue improving its anti-spam service and build out its wiki and forum features.

Automattic also won two Crunchies on Friday — awards that a few other blogs and ourselves gave to startups: They included “most likely to succeed” as well as “Best startup CEO” for Schneider.

The financing was led by existing investors Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, and Radar Partners.

We launched early yesterday morning, but an overwhelming spike in traffic, a subsequent server crash and no fallback combined to shut down the Web site for a whole day.
We’ve learned some lessons.

1) It is hard to launch a start-up. It is surreal to be on this side of the Internet meltdowns, something we covered smugly in our previous role of employed reporter. I recall how we at SiliconBeat wrote about blog search start-up Sphere on the morning of its launch a few months ago, and linked to them — only to discover they’d been stymied by some last-minute bugs. All this traffic hit their site, when they were down, and much of that traffic may not have returned. Tony Conrad, Sphere’s chief exec, at the time, had a very rough morning. Tony, now it’s your turn to chuckle. We feel your pain.

2) Got to think big. We were paying $30/month for our old SiliconBeat server. So when people suggested we upgrade to a special stand-alone server for VentureBeat, at $100/month, we thought it a prudent move — placing us at the top end of what we thought appropriate for our old traffic at SiliconBeat. But when high-profile bloggers pointed to our site from their blogs (such as Om, Arrington, Primack. Jessica Guynn, among others) yesterday morning, we crashed and never recovered. We didn’t figure out the whole story. But we’ve changed our minds since this morning, and decided to pay $400/month. Be cheap, but not too cheap. And because we’re boot-strapping, this isn’t always an easy call.

3) If something can go wrong, it will. Murphy’s Law. Toni Schneider at WordPress warned us about this a couple of months ago. He even stood by, ready to host us on WordPress servers for free. Still, Murphy’s law kicked in. We had nailed everything else. Thor had crafted the site, I’d proofed it. But we didn’t take the servers seriously enough. We launched, it felt great to be in the air — “until the wing fell off,” as Thor, my developer put it.

4) Have friends. A dead server makes one panic, and we want to thank the folks for their support, in particular Nik Cubrilovic, over at TechCrunch, for lending sound advice. Read this post he shared with us about the overload earlier this year at Techcrunch.

5) The fight goes on. No point whimpering, or pointing fingers about blame. The next day is coming, and you got to try flying again. We remember Tony Conrad’s smile on his face a week after his botched launch, when everything was going dandy for him again.