There seems to be a lot of confusion about VaultPress and I think this is down to the flaky name which emphasises the backup aspect of the service. I suspect they decided to skew towards that because it is a selling point that anyone can understand but the two groundbreaking features - features that put it well beyond any existing backup plugins - are that VaultPress PATCHES and MONITORS your site.

Google's super-smart Matt Cutts has an excellent buzz about Why VaultPress is Important. He draws attention to this part of the announcement:

"In the future, if your site is tampered with in any way, we’ll know within minutes and can take appropriate steps."

Again, VaultPress will be WATCHING your site. All of it. If a hacker somehow gets in and places a subtle link on some old post that you would never notice in a million years, VaultPress will. Remember, this is from the people who brought you Akismet.

Now, you may not think this is important, link-hijacking may seem to be a far less concrete concern than the more obvious worry of losing all your data due to some sort of mistake or server failure, but the next year or two will see your priorities turned on their head.

We are on the verge of a serious surge in Web usage because of a new wave of devices, led by the iPad, that will encourage more people to spend more time online. People who previously avoided the Web, people like my parents, now have an enticing onramp. This will be the most noticeable surge of newbies onto the Internet since back in the day, when AOL started mailing discs to every home in America. This is AWESOME news for any of us who own websites because there is going to be a lot more traffic to go round, and those idiots will be clicking a lot of ads.

The BAD NEWS, however, is that there will also be a lot more money to be made by hacking WordPress sites and inserting links into old posts. Site hacking has already increased exponentially over the past couple of years, mainly because a strong market has formed for buying and selling links. The increase in traffic and money will mean that if your site has any skin in the game, it will be a target.

Professional hackers are subtle, they don't plaster your homepage will L33T messages, they simply place non-obvious links in old posts that you, the owner, are unlikely to visit. Like patient vampires, they slowly drain away your site's PageRank.

So, having a service that monitors your site is really, really useful.

Of course, it also helps to prevent them getting in to begin with, and that is where immediate hot-patching is useful. Now, you may be a very efficient admin, who updates all the sites under his wing just as soon as you hear about a new security update - if you wake up in the morning and discover that an update has been released overnight, you update all your sites while you drink your coffee. BUT. What if a hacker, knowing that a security hole is certain to appear at some point, decides to make a list of attractive sites he will automatically hack within moments of an update being released? What if, like many hackers, he exploits that useful gap between an update being released and sites actually being updated? That is where hot-patching comes in useful, that is where VaultPress saves you a wasted day and some major headaches.

You know, we discussed hot-patching here in the comments the last time a load of WP-based sites got compromised - the consensus was that, sure, it would be wonderful, but technically impossible. Well, look, here's Automattic saying that they have a way to do it.

And, coming back around to that crowd favorite, backups, VaultPress does it realtime, as you post, not on a scheduled basis like BackupBuddy. That is a big difference and an important one in an age when we are using to services such as GMail backing up our emails as we write them. Nightly backups are one thing, realtime backups are quite another.

Now, let me just temporarily remove my head from Matt's butt and say that there are some major problems with what he is proposing - simply put, the price sucks. Or, at least, it might suck. It seems to suck. The word on the street is that it sucks. We don't really know, but the "planned price" of $25 dollars per mother-fuckin'-month is ... problematic. Don't get me wrong, if you have a huge site, a site that is your one-and-only central focus, the price is a steal. If, like Matt, you have 33 gigabytes of photos and thousands of online stalkers, $300 per year is not a problem. Likewise, if you have a business or if your livelihood depends upon your Web presence well, then, sure, $300 per year is nothing.

Most of us, however, have divided our attention among a flotilla of smaller, more specific and blissfully amateur sites. We would LOVE to have all those sites monitored, hot-patched and backed-up in realtime, but that might mean paying thousands.

Matt has already responded to one comment expressing concerns about the pricing with a fairly dismissive "If you’re a casual user, maybe it’s not a good fit" and, okay, yeah, Automattic are entitled to sell their service for whatever amount they want but, hmmm, I can't help feeling that they are missing the bigger picture.

It would be good for ALL of us if there was widespread adoption of hot-patching, making WordPress - by far the leading CMS - a less juicy target. I also believe that Automattic will end up making a lot more money by targeting not just that 1% of WP sites that are big and profitable enough (or small and stupid enough) to pay $300 per year. Is the underlying cost of any online service that great? Couldn't they make more money by pricing it more along the lines of the $70 per year that Apple's MobileMe charges? Or anything under $100 for smaller, less frequently updated sites, sites that don't have 33 gigabytes of photos?

I'm just saying.