Automattic Launches VaultPress – No BackupBuddy Killer

The biggest news of the week so far in the WordPress world happened yesterday when Automattic launched a new service called VaultPress. Instead of explaining what VaultPress does, Matt Mullenweg published a comment on Techcrunch that sums it up nicely.

It can handle any amount of stuff. For example my site (ma.tt) has about 30,000 photos on it, totaling about 33 gigabytes.

It’s an all-in-one package. You don’t need one thing to back up your database, one thing for your files, one thing for your themes, et cetera.

It’s real-time. You make a post and it’s in the cloud seconds later.

It’s enterprise-grade and not reliant on one provider, including us. Your site is stored on no fewer than 2 cloud services in addition to our own copies.

It going to do more than just backup. The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.

There’s even more I can’t talk about yet.

When asked whether VaultPress was designed for self hosted WordPress sites or WordPress.com users, Toni Schneider responded with:

VaultPress will be available for WP.org installs (and was in fact primarily developed for WP.org users).

This should help mitigate the confusion. Also further in the comments on the initial launch post, Matt said that VaultPress is technically on a different infrastructure than WordPress.com.

I didn’t see VaultPress coming but it doesn’t surprise me that something like it was launched. I mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter that I noticed a bunch of backup plugins and services specifically tailored to WordPress showing up in my FeedReader. In fact, I reviewed one of them called Backupify. VaultPress is in the middle of stiff competition when you consider that most webhosts enable backups through cPanel, or free WordPress plugins that back up the database of the website or, commercial plugins such as Backup Buddy which I’ll continue to use in favor of VaultPress because I feel that VaultPress doesn’t take away what a good product BackupBuddy is. Also, Backup Buddy has the ability to make migrating a site from one host to another as easy as pie. Right now, VaultPress only backs up and restores to the same site.

The one feature that intrigues me is that VaultPress will be able to monitor your site:

The VaultPress engine will be able to push hotfixes to zero-day security vulnerabilities, for example.

I know Matt would love to have a way to push a button and have a bunch of sites upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Well, this gets him part of the way there and there is cash involved to boot! What I don’t want to happen is some sort of major delay between the 0 day fixes being available for all WordPress users versus those who have paid for that type of comfort. I doubt that will happen but I think the benefit here is that by using VaultPress, you’ll be one of the first to get the fixes so you don’t have to worry about any upgrades.

It’s interesting to note that there is no price listed anywhere on the site. That’s because the service is in beta. In fact, if you browse to their beta application page, you’ll notice that one of the fields specifically asks how much you would be willing to pay per month to cover all of your WordPress powered sites. I put in $5.00 per site because it seems reasonable to me. $60.00 per year is not much to ask for when you consider everything that is going on behind the scenes of VaultPress to make sure it doesn’t disappear like other companies that couldn’t find a way to stay in business.

However, I hope that the team at PluginBuddy.com does not get discouraged because of the launch of VaultPress. Right now, their backup solution offers more bang for the buck although without the convenience of having the data in the cloud. Their price is only $25.00 and that covers two websites. This price also covers upgrades to the plugin and one year of support. $25.00 for an entire year. VaultPress will need to be pretty darn cheap or offer as many features as Backup Buddy in order to be considered an awesome commercial alternative.