Backup solution

How to Pick the Right WordPress Backup Solution for Your Needs

Backing up your WordPress site on a regular basis is imperative.

Why? It’s not just something you need to do because all the pros tell you to. Rather, it’s important because you run the very real risk of losing everything on your site if you don’t. And if you put as much effort into your sites as we do, we know you don’t want that to happen!

There are a lot of WordPress backup solutions including popular plugins like BackupBuddy, BackWPUp, and UpdraftPlus, but today I’d like to show you two of my favorites. Each services a different WordPress user demographic but are equally superb in terms of functionality, ease of use and stability.

VaultPress

If you own just one or two sites, VaultPress is the backup solution for you. Not only is it ridiculously easy to use, it’s also reliable, which is what you want out of something you’re putting your trust in to backup your precious site content effectively.

VaultPress Logo VaultPress is made by Automattic — the same folks behind WordPress — so that should give you some sense of its legitimacy. Any single site can make use of it and you don’t need to have in-depth developer skills to put it to work.

This plugin is available at three different levels. First is the Lite license, which costs $55/year and offers daily backups and a 30-day archive of backups. This is pretty basic, but for many people, it’s enough and gives them the peace of mind they need.

Next is the Basic license. Priced at $165/year, you can expect all the benefits of the Lite version with the addition of realtime backup, which is especially useful if you receive a lot of comments, upload a lot of files, or create a lot of new posts each day. It also maintains a full backup archive so you can restore from months ago, if you’d like.

Finally, there’s the Premium license, which costs $440/year and offers all the benefits of the Lite and Basic versions along with priority support. This means your support requests for help with backing up or securing your site will be prioritized over those with a Lite or Basic license. You’ll also get daily security scans, which can help to spot security threats, malware, and malicious code immediately.

ManageWP

If you own multiple websites, your needs are a bit more complicated. You’ll need a backup solution that’s tailored to a large portfolio — although VaultPress is awesome, your costs would quickly add up across multiple sites! ManageWP is the answer.

ManageWP Logo

You can create, customize, and schedule regular backups of your sites, including database-only backups and full site backups. Once within the ManageWP dashboard, you can create a new backup schedule. Within it, you can choose from a wide variety of task options, like when backups should occur, what each backup should include, how many backups to keep (and for how long), if you wish to exclude any specific files or folders, and more.

You can choose what websites you’d like to apply the new backup schedule to, then you can pick where you want the backups to be stored. You have four options including FTP, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and email. Once you click “Save”, the new backup is saved and you can access it from the backup management page from then on.

ManageWP offers fully customizable plans to suit any and every need. You can add or subtract the number of websites you need to backup to adjust the pricing as well. So, if you’re a blogger, manage ten websites and opt for the Standard plan, you’ll pay $7/month (please note that this only includes manual backups). The Professional plan is designed for small businesses, developers, and marketers and is priced at $21/month. And finally the Business plan, which is designed for large businesses, SEO companies, and web marketing firms, is priced at $42/month. But again, the more websites you manage, the more the cost per site decreases.

Conclusion

Though many backup solutions exist, VaultPress and ManageWP serve two very different sectors of the WordPress market and are equally effective in their respective areas.

What backup solution do you use and why?

One response to “How to Pick the Right WordPress Backup Solution for Your Needs”

  1. Eric Amundson Avatar

    Great article, Tom!

    There are so many different backup solutions for WordPress that work well, but the two we use most often at IvyCat currently are ManageWP and BackupBuddy.

    I love that both solutions offer off-site storage of your backups, and we tie them into Dropbox and remote FTP to get the backups off the server too.

    I’m quite fond of telling customers that it’s really important to know your host’s backup plan, and then completely ignore it. Don’t rely on hosting account backups alone.

    I’ve seen entire sites lost because a customer assumed that their host had their back(up), but were shocked to find the opposite.

    Even when hosts are backing things up, it’s always best to have your own fall-back(up).

    Bad puns, I know. It’s an addiction. :)