VaultPress is a cool security service by Automattic, but if you take a look at the pricing and plans, some may think that this is the luxury line of data safekeeping. However, tons of people that have had to utilize the restoration feature of VaultPress say it’s worth every penny. Boles University.com has a non-profit WordPress multi-site installation with about 14 sub-domains under its belt. VaultPress supports multi-site but if the subscription is for the main site, only the main sites files and data will be backed up, sub-sites will be ignored. In order to backup everything, each site within the multi-site installation needs their own individual subscription. As you can imagine, it wouldn’t take long for that to be expensive. As David W Boles points out in his article, it would be nice to see VaultPress come up with some sort of plan that allows non-profits the ability to backup their main site along with their satellite sites for a much more affordable price. I’m not sure how VaultPress would be able to verify whether a multi-site installation is non-profit or not without paperwork validation but it certainly seems like this is a missed oppurtunity market segment for VaultPress.
This is the world of WordPress which means there are alternatives when it comes to safekeeping your data. A relatively new service called BackupPress performs many of the same functions as VaultPress but at a much more affordable price. In fact, taking a look at their comparison page, they support WordPress multi-site at just 25$ per year. At the time of publishing this article, I couldn’t locate any specific text that states restrictions similar to VaultPress in that each sub-domain within a multi-site network would need it’s own subscription. Hopefully, a representative from the service will stop by the comments section and fill us in on the details.
Hey Jeffro!
We absolutley appreciate the shoutout, especially since BackupPress is about to exit beta (at which point price becomes $50/year btw). At this stage, BackupPress pricing is based on per-blog, so multi-site would be priced similarly to VaultPress (ie: charged for each blog), but this post has the team here noodling on if we can have a specific multisite license, or a non-profit license…
Would love to hear the community’s feedback on this. Our goal is to keep the plugin so simple anyone can use it, but if this is an area of demand then we absolutely want to help! As an example, we heard from many folk in the community that file size was a big issue with many plugins, so the new version supports files well in excess of 100MB (we’ve tested up to 500MB, but some of that is host specific).
In short, if this is an area of need, we want to help! Feel free to say hello@23press.com to let us know!