A Look at VaultPress, the Automatic Back-up Service
by Kevin on March 31, 2010
VaultPress, a service that will eventually launch to more than just a few beta testers, aims to help you manage and create automatic back-ups of your site. The service will be “paid,” meaning it won’t be free, but will provide peace of mind when it comes to the security of your blog – everything will be backed up in a multi-cloud environment.
The service has been launched by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, which also provides resources to the open-source WordPress.org service. Other “plugins” or services such as blogVault also provide reasonably-priced services for backing-up a blog, but might not be as feature-packed as VaultPress when it is officially released.
On the VaultPress Blog, you’ll find interesting facts Matt Mullenweg posted about the service, which set it apart from other services out there:
- It can handle any amount of stuff – whether you have just 50MB of content or 33GB.
- It’s an all-in-one package, meaning you won’t have to seek out different plugins or options for backing up your database, your files, your themes, and so on.
- You can make a post and it’ll be backed up within just a few seconds.
- Your information is stored on no less than two cloud services in addition to their own copies.
- Security vulnerabilities will be able to be “hotfixed” quickly, even more quickly than manually updating your site.
Obviously, the service won’t be ideal for people who only have one blog that they publish to a few times a year and it doesn’t generate them a profit. It has been built from the ground up to service as a solution for preventing data from being destroyed in the event of a security breach or any other problem you may encounter while blogging.
Other main points of the service:
- VaultPress protects more than just your content. It is able to understand the complete WordPress environment, meaning everything from your plugins to the dashboard, themes, and even your revisions are all backed up and ready to be restored.
- Real-time, continuous monitoring provides you confidence that everything you are doing is being protected at the same time.
- The system VaultPress uses is backed by WordPress Experts who maintain the WordPress.com website.
- The service provides an elite level of service.
- The service is easy to install on your site – sign up, then install one plugin. You’ll be able to add additional blogs at any time.
What do you think of this new service – being priced at $30 a month? Personally, I feel that it is a great value (although priced higher than many hosting services), but I’d like to see how it develops after a more final version is released.
A private beta is available, so if you are interested in the service, I encourage you to check it out.
One comment
I was ambivalent to the idea at first. A large fraction of bloggers use wordpress, and a large fraction of them aren’t technically savvy enough (or just don’t care enough) to back up their files. So there’s a market. And the company is one I have warm fuzzies for, so that’s cool. I was thinking it would cost $5 a month or so, somewhere along the lines of the shared hosting plans that many people use. But then…
$30 A MONTH!? No way! There’s probably only a few thousand blogs on Earth that can afford that through their own revenue.
Here’s the thing: I back up my entire wordpress site once a week to an unreasonable degree. I hook up an FTP client and download all the files into a new folder. I export all the posts, comments, etc using the built-in WP export function. And I download my database using the WP-backup plugin. These three sections go into a labeled backup folder on my computer. I could recover the site in <1 hour with these. It takes ~15 minutes to back up everything, once a week.
Alternatively, my host offers automated backups for $12 a YEAR. I don't know who VaultPress is targeted towards, but it is not the average blogger or anyone with a clue how WP works. I mean, my backup system works unless my computer dies at the same exact time as my hosted site, and we are in different countries. I will not buy VP's $30 a month "Alien Insurance" *phew*
.-= Steve´s last blog ..April 3 – Super Outbreak – Fact of the Day (No Comments) =-.
by Steve on April 3, 2010 at 12:06 pm. #