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Jeff Chandler

A VaultPress Everyone Can Afford

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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6 responses to “A VaultPress Everyone Can Afford”

  3. I had hoped it would include more. It is a still a good deal for people new to WP or people who have just migrated from WP.com.
    For me, this is not worth the monthly fees as we can backup via our server on a per account basis and store them for 30 days. We also have daily database backups which are emailed to our gmail account where they can be stored until the account is full, then the oldest are deleted.
    This allows us to rollback changes per account or even access the files and db from the server backup (stored on a separate HDD) and rollback the changes. We backup the db and email it so that even if our server completely dies and both HDDs fail, we can still restore the website using just the db backup. While this will not restore items such as images, we can retrieve these from our CDN or from other locations.
    Although this vaultpress is not for me, I do see that it would be ideal for many, many smaller websites. However, they should also look at getting a better host so that it is more secure and is attacked less.
    It still astonishes me that there are hosts using 32bit hardware and php4!

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  4. @Steven – Providing everything that VaultPress does and the site you mentioned has to cost money. My first question would be, how do they plan on making iControlWP a long-term sustainable venture at the prices they are charging. On paper, it’s insane that they are only charging about 36 cents a month per website.

    @Dave – Yeah, there are always alternatives and no one wants to pay for anything these days but the process you just described sounds like something many people wouldn’t want to bother going through. So just paying for a service like this at an affordable prices is just easier.

    As for webhosts, how much do you think that’s all because of costs?

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  5. @Jeffro, Well, I have 13 sites with icontrolWP.com and am paying about $24 for their “Worpdrive” feature as well as a control center for al my sites. They use rackspace i believe for their storage but I could be wrong on that. I know they have several thousand clients so far and their tech support has been fantastic. They are relatively new on the scene but I hemmed and hawed and finally gave them a chance and have been pretty happy so far. I’d at least check out their 30 day trial thing to get an idea of what they are all about.

    Oh – also the backups are those kinds where they make an initial backup of everything and then each subsequent backup is simply the changes to the last backup. I forget what that’s called but clearly it’s a space saver.

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  6. Hi Jeffro,

    Just wanted to pitch in here and follow-up on Steven’s comment (thanks for sharing about us and your experience btw!).

    Our business model is perfectly sustainable… we’ve been profitable since about 2~3 weeks after we started. Managing sites at $0.36 each per month while wont make us millionaires, works fine. We offer a great base service that scales well. We have addons (clone + backup) with more on the way that will help us scale even more.

    Frankly, we’re banking on our WorpDrive backup service which is really starting to take off in the last couple of months – people are starting to realise you don’t need to pay $15/month per site to the likes of VaultPress to have reliable backups.

    VP only does certain data (http://help.vaultpress.com/get-to-know/). We do it all and the kitchen sink.

    If you’re serious about protecting your sites, you need to have a reliable backup system that doesn’t fail because of your web host’s PHP and security restrictions – all our backups are effectively full, even while they are differential every day, and they are available right back to day 1 – not just 30 days.

    AND, every WorpDrive license includes the iControlWP management license.

    It’s viable because it works, and it’s automated (and it’s not free). We reduce our support costs by taking the time to build a system that works and is reliable. Do we have problems? Of course, it’s amazing the sheer diversity of web hosts – but once we work around 1 little web hosting quirk, it works for all clients with the same setup going forward. Thereby reducing our tech support costs as our backup system is centralized on our servers, not yours.

    We have a compatibility test which means you can never activate WorpDrive on a site that doesn’t mean our basic requirements – with time we’ll remove most of those requirements (like exec() ), and then we’ll have 1 of the only backup systems (in the world) that can run on any web host that has PHP (5+) as a minimum requirement – 99% of all WordPress sites meet that.

    Anyway, I’ve laboured on this enough – your best bet is to try us out and see what you think – there are always other options than the big names.

    If you have any questions, grab me on the chat on our website, or on twitter (@paulgoodchild)
    Cheers (for reading this far ;) !
    Paul.

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