Interview With The Founders of WPRemote

WPRemote is a quick and easy way to monitor multiple websites all for the price of free. However, they’ve recently launched a $5.00 per month/per site automatic backup plan. I caught up with the founders of this small service to see what their plans were for the future.

What is WP Remote and why did you decide to start the service?

WP Remote is a service for monitoring and updating all of your WordPress sites. Human Made built the initial version a few years back out of necessity — a way of streamlining the repetitive tasks associated with managing our many client sites. We received positive feedback on WP Remote from those we showed it to, and decided to invest a bit of time releasing a public version.

What’s all included in the free account?

WP Remote will monitor your WordPress sites for updates to plugins, theme, and WordPress core. If it finds any out of date software, you can update individually or all at once. WP Remote also lets you perform an on-demand backup of an entire site. Signing up is easy, so go ahead and give it a try.

Why did you decide to offer a free account?

Much of the community is built on sharing what you know and have. We thought making WP Remote publicly available was an appropriate way for us to contribute back.

How does this service differ from VaultPress or some of the other security monitoring services?

WP Remote doesn’t do any security monitoring at this time. We’re focusing on the best functionality for managing your WordPress sites.

Can you provide some of the technical details involved with the backups such as where they are stored and what makes them secure?

On your web host, the backup file is first generated with our open source HM Backup library. Our on-demand backup feature then streams the backup file from your web host to your computer. On the other hand, our premium Automatic Backups feature stores your backup file in an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket that we manage, making it very easy for users who are looking for a hands off approach.

How are you able to offer such a service at such an affordable price?

It’s been a labor of love so far. We’d like to invest much more time into improving WP Remote though. To help us justify this investment, we plan to introduce additional features worth paying for (a cost that you can also pass on to your clients).

Are there plans in the future to add the ability to be able to automatically restore a site from a backup?

No set plans, but restoring a site from backup (or cloning an existing site) is a feature we’d love as well. We do have a handy guide for people who want to restore their site from a backup. We’re always looking for people to check out WP Remote and send us feedback.

What’s been the most common feedback you’ve received from your customers?

Funny you ask! We ran a survey just last week — one common request is for an email notification when you have a plugin or theme to update. We think this would be neat, and it would be even cooler to have WP Remote automatically upgrade plugins and themes it knew were safe to upgrade.

What is the long term goal of WP Remote?

To build a smart, intuitive application to manage our WordPress sites so we don’t have to. In doing so, we hope others grow to love WP Remote as much as we do. We are also working to expose an external API for WP Remote so developers can better integrate their own tools with us. We are pretty excited about the potential.