Blog Tipz

In an attempt to compete directly with Blogger and other free/paid blog services, WordPress.com has upgraded their storage space to 3GB from the previous 50MB (a 60x increase). Matt Mullenweg also notes that it would cost more than $300 to host the same amount of files using TypePad and with Blogger you only get 1GB (with a 10GB upgrade plan costing $20/year).

With this announcement, it will mean that more bloggers will not only be able to store more content and not have to worry about going over their limits. New bloggers will be attracted to the storage space and will likely choose WordPress over Google’s Blogger service.

Automattic’s main goal in doing this is to transform the way people blog, as they have made considerable upgrades to the file storage back end (with S3-backed storage, caching, backup, and replication advances) over the past year. If you previously purchased space upgrades, the limits of the paid upgrades have now been increased (1GB is now upgraded to 5GB) for no additional charge. You may still purchase upgrades so that you can host larger files such as movies.

Many bloggers will have to see how Blogger/Picasa Web and TypePad change to help drive more people back to their blogging platform.