I have been very vocal over the last few years about my love of VaultPress, the WordPress backup service by Automattic. There are many other great WordPress backup options out there such as CodeGuard and BackupBuddy.
For me, VaultPress is an essential plugin. It backs up WordPress powered websites every hour and allows you to return to any point to either download important files or restore your website with one click. When I say any point, I mean ANY POINT: VaultPress allows you to get backups from any hour from the point you started using the service. You could go back three years to a Sunday afternoon to find the code from a widget you used that day. VaultPress is much more than a “Peace of Mind” service. It pretty much guarantees you never lose anything from your website.
Unfortunately, the price of the service puts off many people. Their cheapest plan is $15 per month. That is not a lot of money to many people, however there are many WordPress users who pay less than $10 per month for their hosting, so convincing them that they need to pay $15 per month for a backup service is difficult.
It looks like VaultPress have realised this too. I read an article by Jeff Chandler of WPTavern today that VaultPress have announced a new plan called VaultPress Lite. The plan makes VaultPress a more competitive option for WordPress users. For $5 per month, the service will provide:
- 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.
The key differences between the $5 per month lite plan and the $15 per month basic plan are daily backups instead of hourly backups and backups are only stored for thirty days. The ability to go back months or years is one of the features I love about VaultPress, however it is not something that absolutely everyone needs.
I have no doubt this new plan option will convince a lot of people to try VaultPress out. I imagine many existing VaultPress users may even downgrade their plans. Currently, I back up three of my WordPress websites, for a total of $45 per month. I have several other WordPress websites which are not backed up through WordPress because it does not make sense financially. $15 per month works out at $180 per year and a lot of the small content websites I own only make $10-$30 per month. Therefore, spending $180 a year backing them up is simply not worth it.
This new price plan changes things for me (and for others). $5 per month is a much more affordable solution for websites. The lite plan does not offer hourly backups and backups are deleted after thirty days, however most of the time backups are only required from a few days before (i.e. when you realise something is broken or missing etc). Moving forward, I will probably continue to use the $15 per month plan for important websites and will use the $5 per month option for smaller websites that are not making much money.
If you have never used VaultPress before, I highly recommend checking it out. The service only takes a few minutes to configure and with a new entry point of $5 per month, it is one of the most affordable WordPress backup solutions available online.
Kevin