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A VaultPress Everyone Can Afford

A VaultPress Everyone Can Afford

By Jeffro on May 10, 2013

vaultpress logoThe wait is over for those that have wanted an affordable offering from VaultPress. The service announced on May 8th that a new service level called VaultPress Lite would be available for an astoundingly cheap $5.00 per month, per site. The plan covers the basics:

  • Daily backups that happen automatically, so you can focus on creating, not logistics.
  • Automated site restores, so you can restore your entire site with a single click.
  • Thirty days of saved backups, so you can go back in time to restore the last clean version of your site.

Customers also have access to their support staff as well. Since VaultPress launched, there have been a number of people who have exclaimed their jubilation of being able to easily restore their sites after a catastrophe. I bet it only takes one experience like that for VaultPress to seem like a bargain, regardless of the price.

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Automattic Launches VaultPress – No BackupBuddy Killer

Automattic Launches VaultPress – No BackupBuddy Killer

By Jeffro on March 31, 2010

The biggest news of the week so far in the WordPress world happened yesterday when Automattic launched a new service called VaultPress. Instead of explaining what VaultPress does, Matt Mullenweg published a comment on Techcrunch that sums it up nicely.

  • It can handle any amount of stuff. For example my site (ma.tt) has about 30,000 photos on it, totaling about 33 gigabytes.
  • It’s an all-in-one package. You don’t need one thing to back up your database, one thing for your files, one thing for your themes, et cetera.
  • It’s real-time. You make a post and it’s in the cloud seconds later.
  • It’s enterprise-grade and not reliant on one provider, including us. Your site is stored on no fewer than 2 cloud services in addition to our own copies.
  • It going to do more than just backup. The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.
  • There’s even more I can’t talk about yet.

When asked whether VaultPress was designed for self hosted WordPress sites or WordPress.com users, Toni Schneider responded with:

VaultPress will be available for WP.org installs (and was in fact primarily developed for WP.org users).

This should help mitigate the confusion. Also further in the comments on the initial launch post, Matt said that VaultPress is technically on a different infrastructure than WordPress.com.

I didn’t see VaultPress coming but it doesn’t surprise me that something like it was launched. I mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter that I noticed a bunch of backup plugins and services specifically tailored to WordPress showing up in my FeedReader. In fact, I reviewed one of them called Backupify. VaultPress is in the middle of stiff competition when you consider that most webhosts enable backups through cPanel, or free WordPress plugins that back up the database of the website or, commercial plugins such as Backup Buddy which I’ll continue to use in favor of VaultPress because I feel that VaultPress doesn’t take away what a good product BackupBuddy is. Also, Backup Buddy has the ability to make migrating a site from one host to another as easy as pie. Right now, VaultPress only backs up and restores to the same site.

The one feature that intrigues me is that VaultPress will be able to monitor your site:

The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.

I know Matt would love to have a way to push a button and have a bunch of sites upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Well, this gets him part of the way there and there is cash involved to boot! What I don’t want to happen is some sort of major delay between the 0 day fixes being available for all WordPress users versus those who have paid for that type of comfort. I doubt that will happen but I think the benefit here is that by using VaultPress, you’ll be one of the first to get the fixes so you don’t have to worry about any upgrades.

It’s interesting to note that there is no price listed anywhere on the site. That’s because the service is in beta. In fact, if you browse to their beta application page, you’ll notice that one of the fields specifically asks how much you would be willing to pay per month to cover all of your WordPress powered sites. I put in $5.00 per site because it seems reasonable to me. $60.00 per year is not much to ask for when you consider everything that is going on behind the scenes of VaultPress to make sure it doesn’t disappear like other companies that couldn’t find a way to stay in business.

However, I hope that the team at PluginBuddy.com does not get discouraged because of the launch of VaultPress. Right now, their backup solution offers more bang for the buck although without the convenience of having the data in the cloud. Their price is only $25.00 and that covers two websites. This price also covers upgrades to the plugin and one year of support. $25.00 for an entire year. VaultPress will need to be pretty darn cheap or offer as many features as Backup Buddy in order to be considered an awesome commercial alternative.

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Special Backup Buddy Coupon For Tavern Readers

Special Backup Buddy Coupon For Tavern Readers

By Jeffro on March 8, 2010

One of the downfalls of the recent Backup Buddy giveaway I held after my review of the plugin is that some people decided to play their luck in obtaining a free copy instead of purchasing out right using the special launch day coupon that gave buyers 10% off. I’m really happy to announce that I’ve been granted a special coupon code that is good until Midnight of March 13th that will save you 10% off any membership of the Backup Buddy Plugin. The coupon code is TAVERN10. Oh, and if you decide to take advantage of this 10% opportunity, do so through this link as I’ll receive a small amount from your purchase. In my opinion, the prices for Backup Buddy are already very affordable so saving an additional 10% is just icing on the cake.

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Backup Buddy Winners

Backup Buddy Winners

By Jeffro on March 5, 2010

After I published my review of BackupBuddy yesterday, I managed to talk Cory Miller into letting me give away a single and a developer membership option to two lucky commenters. I’d like to announce that Kevin has won the single membership version while Jeremy LeRay takes the developer version. In order to choose the winners, I took the comment ID number from the first comment and then the comment ID number in the last comment on the post and put them in a random number picker. After letting the picker choose a number a few times, I matched that number to the comment ID. A fair way to choose the winners I’d say.

I’d also like to thank each and every one of you that purchased BackupBuddy through my affiliate link. Purchases as well as the number of comments to the post were overwhelming. I simply couldn’t believe all of the developer version memberships that people were buying through me. In one day, I made enough money to travel to at least one more WordCamp this year if I chose to do that.

Congrats to Keven and Jeremy LeRay, backups are no longer a problem for the both of you! Also congrats to Cory Miller and the PluginBuddy team on a great launch.

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Review Of Backupify Part One

Review Of Backupify Part One

By Jeffro on February 16, 2010

Browsing through my feedreader today, I came across a service known as Backupify which uses Amazons cloud service to store the backup data. Much if not all of the data that we send to Twitter, Facebook, and other social outlets does not exist on our own machines. Depending on how you feel about that data, it could be a big loss to see it all of a sudden disappear. One of the services that Backupify is aiming to support is WordPress.

Registering a new account is simple and gives you 1 Gigabyte of data. After registering, you’ll need to click on the Manage link for WordPress under Services In Beta. This will initiate the backup process. However, you’ll need to install the WordPress Backupify plugin before you can proceed.

After the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll have to visit the plugins settings page and initialize the plugin to the Backupify service. You can also take this time to configure the backup option. Notice how I said option. That’s because the only option you can configure from within the plugin is the ability to exclude comments. The full backup area provides a button where you can backup the site locally. The question is, what is backed up? The database of course.

For some reason after I ran the backup locally, the process became stuck at 99%. The status within the browser window said Done so nothing was ongoing. When trying to refresh, I received a warning that my backup would fail if I reloaded the page but after waiting for 5 minutes, I went through with the page refresh.

I have no idea what happened to 99% of the database that was backed up. After refreshing the page, I gave the full backup another try and the same thing happened. It’s supposed to reach 100% and then save the file to my desktop as a third copy. I’ll troubleshoot this more and report on my findings in part 2 of the review.

Speaking of Part 2, that will be published in the next day or two as the backup system is performed automatically and the backups do not show in the archive until 24-48 hours after it’s complete. Speaking of things happening automatically, the process of installing and configuring this plugin has confused me. I’m used to clicking boxes or selecting options but this plugin does not really have any of that. The Backupify website is also sparse with options because everything is performed automatically. The only thing I can really configure on the website is managing accounts and selecting when backups should occur and how I should be emailed.

Backupify is a free service for up to 1 Gig of data so if you give it a try this evening or in the next few days, let me know in the comments if the 99% local backup problem happens for you.

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