For many of us, our WordPress blogs and sites are not just personal blogs or a hobby but our livelihood and source of income so its only fair to say that we value it very highly and that we’ll do anything to protect it, right? That’s where VaultPress comes in. WordPress creator and founding developer Matt Mullenweg via Automattic, has launched a new premium blog backup service called VaultPress. Matt announced it on his blog and on the VaultPress blog a couple days ago. This new service’s goal and purpose is to protect WordPress-powered blogs and sites from any type of disaster, natural or man-made or even from alien abduction. Hehe
Here’s more about the vision behind VaultPress from Matt’s post:
The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. This is some of the most advanced technology I’ve seen interact with WordPress.
In the future, if your site is tampered with in any way, we’ll know within minutes and can take appropriate steps. The VaultPress core engine will be able to protect you against zero-day security vulnerabilities by updating your blog with hot-fixes, even while you sleep.
If you’re thinking “Why pay for a premium backup service when there lots of free WordPress plugins and services that can do that?” Here are some of the things that VaultPress does, that other free backup solutions can’t or don’t do as pointed out by Matt:
- 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.
IMHO, VaultPress is an awesome service and something that will be useful for all WordPress-powered sites and blogs. However, not all WordPress users will be able to use VaultPress not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t afford it. VaultPress is not for everybody. Like what Matt said “it’s a high-end product, for high-end users.” It is aimed at businesses, companies and professionals who run WordPress-powered sites or blogs but don’t have the time and resources to monitor them, do the backups and do repairs when disaster strikes.
VaultPress Signup Page
Right now VaultPress is still in beta, meaning its not yet available to the public but interested parties can apply for a beta invite. I applied to be a beta tester and hope I’d get picked so that I can do a more detailed hands-on review of VaultPress for you guys. Btw, since VaultPress is a premium service, users will have to pay a monthly fee for it. However, as of writing there’s not much information regarding the pricing/rates but it says on the signup page that the fee starts at around $15/month.
What do you think of VaultPress? If you can afford it, is it something you’ll pay for? What other features or services do you think should be added in future releases or updates? Please share your thoughts.
@sylv3rblade – I see. It sounds really cool and useful. Although I think its more suitable for bloggers who run multiple blogs/sites. If you only have 1 blog, you can do it yourself via plugins. Also, if you’re on VPS, most hosting providers do nightly backups for free.
Anyways, thanks for sharing! :)
Yep, rsync is a unix/linux software that will synchronize your files from your current server to another (or even on multiple backup servers). You can setup rsync to backup your whole server or simply incremental changes (which is ideal especially if you have a big server :D) to your files.
The only drawback I can see for rsync is the cost but since no one wants to have their servers die on them, yeah it’s pretty cheap ;D
@Joie – You’re not an ordinary blogger, but I do agree that $15/month is something that many if not most bloggers can’t afford to pay for. But then, like what I mentioned in the post, VaultPress is not for everyone and like what Matt said “it’s a high-end product, for high-end users.”
I’m sure its a good service. But I’m just an ordinary blogger who cannot afford to spend $15 a month.
@sylv3rblade – Is rsync a service or a program? $15/month to backup the whole VPS? That’s quite cheap. Anyways, never heard of it before, thanks for sharing. :)
According to reports, VaultPress will initially be offered or starting price will be at $15/month and maybe the price will increase if you have more than 1 blog or website to backup. I dunno, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Nothing beats rsync backup of your whole VPS :) It’s also costing me just $15 a month.
@Jhay – This type of service would definitely give any blogger or website owner a peace of mind. I guess they’ll have different rates or packages for different types of bloggers/website owners but yes, I also hope they’d have affordable prices for small time users like us. :)
It’s a nice service, something that will give you the ultimate peace of mind. Hopefully, it would be offered at a much affordable price for us ordinary bloggers.
@Tejus – Thanks for sharing about BlogVault! Will be looking into it next time. :)
Our service BlogVault, ( http://blogvault.net ) does this too
and has been up for a week. It provides full backup of WordPress
blogs via a plug-in and restore capabilities. BlogVault has
multiple payment options and a free user plan as well.
Unlike Vaultpress, our service is more affordable & suitable for small/medium blogs.