It has only been two months since Microsoft announced their intention to shut down their popular Windows Live Spaces blogging platform and offered an easy migration route to WordPress.com. Since then, WordPress.com has seen a marked increase in signups, and not all of them are coming from Windows Live Spaces.
Before the Windows Live Spaces migration was announced, WordPress.com held steady at about 400,000 signups per month. This number has now more than doubled to about 900,000 per month. With such a steep increase in signups and several new features, WordPress.com is on track to end the year with a bang.
Upgrading from Windows Live Spaces is a simple four-step process. Of course, this is a rather large-scale migration, and there have been plenty of questions along the way. Some of the more frequently asked questions have been answered in this support document, and a few were covered in more detail in yesterday’s announcement. And, as always, the Happiness Engineers are available to help you with any problems that you may encounter.
With the user base blossoming so rapidly, there’s never been a better time to sign up for a free WordPress.com blog, even if you aren’t a Windows Live Spaces refugee. If you’re new to WordPress.com or just blogging in general, stop by Learn WordPress.com for a great getting started guide.
Geez kudos to the server management guys that have put together a setup that can manage 900k new users a month.. Impressive.
now if only we could get blogspot to shut down ;P
I was a long time Space owner (2/2005) and when it started to slow down I stopped writing there and got w/wordpress self hosted. I won “Best of MSN Spaces’ for Fathers Day week in 2006 and got 200,00 page views in a week! I have moved all my content over to WP.com. I wish it owuld have moved all my photos too but I still have them on cd but no visitor can see them. I think they are still on my “SkyDrive” thing at MSN. I am planning to move it again to my self hosted sever but it does not get any traffic to put on top on my todo list.
I emailed MSN many times thru the years to give us a way to export our Spaces but they never got back to me so I was soooo happy when I heard they were working w/WP to do it. I told all my friends from there to move their blogs over to WordPress.
Thanks WordPRess Team! 😉
900,000 signups a month… just on the free WordPress.com hosting? That absolutely blows my mind because I can just imagine how many self-hosted WordPress blogs are popping up in the same timeframe.
I figure it was just a matter of time though. I’ve used a lot of blog platforms and WordPress wins out in almost every competition. Easy to use and free, yet powerful and customizable. How can you beat that?
I have been using both windows live spaces and wordpress.com ever since I began blogging. They are both great even though spaces does have a lack of features. 900,000 sign ups per month is mind blowing, and I’m sure this number is going to be even higher around March 2011 when Spaces is supposed to shut down.
WordPress has most of basic features that content builders need, and some advanced features that developers want.
It’s easy and powerful, so it’s already the first option for most content-oriented website needs.
But, if it wants to consolidate as so, and also be recognized as a full CMS-framework platform, it needs some specific features to make it more solid and expansible/scalable.