A few weeks ago, Skyrocket Websites passed a pretty big milestone — our first full year in business.

We are absolutely delighted that so many musicians, writers, artists, speakers, and small businesses have been able to use the service for so many different reasons, and we want to continue improving, expanding and developing the site so that we can make Skyrocket available to thousands more people.

To do that, we’ve been working feverishly to set up, configure, manage, and deploy hardware and a system which will allow this to happen – so that your site(s) will be quick, reliable, safe and ever improving over the years to come.

But in doing so, of course, we had to revisit our business plan because planning on hosting several thousand blogs is a pretty costly endeavor!

Now, a lot of you may know about Launchpad – our full-service website design/marketing solution used by our top clients, but there are lots of DIY, web-savvy folks out there who could benefit from the service.

Well, today we’re rolling out a new option (in Beta) to accomodate you.

Introducing Skyrocket Professional, which allows you to subscribe to receive extra features and more storage.

Pro members will get massive amounts more storage (we’re increasing 100MB to 3GB… a 30-fold increase!), along with exclusive access to tools like the Blog & User Creator, existing plugins (and new ones to come) and other great features.

Also, occasionally, we have displayed ads on sites to assist with covering hosting costs. This is something we’re going to have to increase on free blogs, but of course Supporter blogs will not have any third party advertising on them.

And more importantly, what we’re also now allowing Pro members *turn off* advertising on up to 2 different sites – as well as your own blog being turned off automatically.

There are a couple of catches, first up we’re having to increase the price of upgrading to Skyrocket Pro to $49.95 per year (that’s still less than $5 per month!).

Also, as I mentioned previously, extra functionality (plugins, premium themes, blogs & user creator and a few others) will only be available for Pro blogs, and there will be a reduction in storage for free blogs too.

Is this ideal? Well, in a utopian world we’d like to give everyone, everything, entirely for free and without any ads! But we’ve got bills to pay too… so, barring that, we hope to still provide great free blogs alongside an absolutely premium Professional service that is more than worth the price of a large coffee per month.

We welcome your feedback, thoughts and requests for new Supporter features in the comments.

Also, if you are experiencing any issues with your Pro subscription or previous credits that you may have lost, please email us at support (at) skyrocketwebsites /dot/ com, and we’ll fix you up (there are always hiccups in a big move).

You can find a bit of a better write up about what Skyrocket Pro offers here.