14 DAY TRIAL // The news that Matt Mullenweg announced yesterday made every WordPress blogger's day a better one. The upgrade is huge and it comes with absolutely no cost. The interesting part is that it might also come off as a Picasa competitor because of the bigger space available for uploading pictures. Of course, there's a huge difference in concept between the two, but the sheer size makes the idea a possibility.
I haven't mentioned the quantity that will be upgraded because this is the type of news that you're so anxious to share with others that you don't know when to throw in the important argument. Before, WordPress gave its users 50 Mb of free space and they had to pay for 1 GB. Now, they'll have at their disposal 60 times that, a whooping 3 GB theirs for the upload. Don't worry, you who have paid for the extra space, Matt Mullenweg said that for the same bucks you would be receiving an additional 5 GB for free. What will you do with 6 GB? That's roughly the hosting of Gmail at the moment.
And speaking of Gmail, here's what Matt thinks about the service he shares with the world and Google's mail: "Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we'll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space. How are we able to do this? Over the past year we've developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don't feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth. We're ready for you," he wrote on his blog. The S3 mentioned is Amazon's S3 storage service.
The other blogging services are now left to eat WordPress' dust, unless they do something and they do it quickly. Blogger only offers 1 GB of free uploading space, while TypePad would offer the same services for 300 dollars. I'm seeing a massive exodus to WP and I cannot possibly imagine why.