I’m letting the cat out of the bag today …
We’ve been quietly (ok, secretly) working for the last couple of months on building our own remote storage destination for BackupBuddy and I’m finally excited to be able to talk about it publicly now!
We’re VERY CLOSE to rolling it out … and like all development I can’t pinpoint exactly how close but now we’re a couple of weeks out from rolling out our very own online backup storage place.
Here’s why we’ve been working on this and will be offering it to BackupBuddy community:
People simply want an EASY, CONVENIENT and AFFORDABLE way to put their backups safely offsite.
And sadly, we’re worried people aren’t backing up their sites offsite somewhere because it’s either too complicated for them to do so, or they get tripped up in the process.
And although we offer several popular remote destination integrations with BackupBuddy, here are some of the hangups we’ve found our customers have had with them:
- DropBox has issues (like their API and storage limits) that we’re still wrestling with … and it’s not the ideal place for WP backups but good for database only ones
- Amazon S3 is a GREAT CHEAP solution … but the login and setup is wonky and confusing. You can’t find cheaper online and offsite storage, but the initial setup trips people up.
- Storing locally is not ideal. If it’s on your site, what happens when your site crashes?
- And yes, you could FTP it to another server, but what happens if it goes down or is compromised?
Frankly, it’s time we helped SIMPLIFY the process of storing offsite backups for our customers.
So we started exploring how we could offer something similar.
We’re calling it BackupBuddy Stash.
And here are some of the initial details I can share with you:
- One simple login – We want people to simply be able to log in with their iThemes membership and not only get upgrades to BackupBuddy but also immediate integration with BackupBuddy Stash.
- Free plan for all users – We’ll offer a small free plan to all current BackupBuddy customers so you can get your initial sites backed up, safely offsite. It’s that important to us!
- Paid upgrades for more space – We’re figuring out pricing currently for those who want more space, but the idea is to offer affordable plans for more storage.
By the way, we haven’t even released BackupBuddy Stash yet and we’re already dreaming up some cool ideas for it in the future.
So get ready … BackupBuddy Stash is coming soon!
If you don’t know by now … it’s never been a better time to buy BackupBuddy. Check out some of the features coming in BackupBuddy 3.1 – I know you’ll be as excited about it as we are!
Our mission is to make people’s lives awesome. We do that by helping to improve your lives through our software through each release, each new product, each new offering and through our phenomenal support team.
So go get BackupBuddy today if you haven’t!
Yet another killer feature for BackupBuddy!
Can’t wait to use this on smaller clients sites. This will fill the gap in the market for clients who don’t need real time backups with VaultPress but still need off site backups.
Great work as per usual iThemes!
Thanks Bronson! We’re super excited as it’s been in the works for months but now we’re close to being able to talk about it publicly.
The free plan is going to make it super easy for people to get their backups stored off-site. Just one more way we’re trying to make people’s lives awesome.
Marvellous, well done iThemes once again! I will certainly be jumping all over this
Sue
Awesome! Which is why we’re offering a free plan … so the majority of our customers can get a good full-site backup at no cost.
Yes! Yes! Yes! A3 and BUB don’t play nice on some of our backups, so this is a great development. Thanks.
We think our community is going to love a seamless, easy, affordable solution that just works too.
Very nice! I was supposed to ask about Amazon Glacier but it seems you guys have a better solution… many many thanks!!!
Glacier off-hand doesn’t seem to be a good fit for BackupBuddy. And with S3 being so cheap anyway, we think it is the better option.
What a fantastic idea. I really love the way you guys are constantly improving and innovating with BackupBuddy. It’s worth the subscription. I’d be interested to know more about how much storage the free option will provide. I run several small sites and it could be an ideal second backup location as well as my Amazon S3 backups.
Thanks! How big are your backup files? Single site ones and the total of all your sites? (We’re trying to gather that data now.)
We’re rolling out the free option to hit the bulk of small sites but I think you’re going to like what we have in mind for the initial release and later months.
Hi Cory,
My backup files are typically 30-40MB and I have one which is 100MB, so fairly small I guess. As always, it’s the media files that take up the room, but I like to include them to get a full, and whole consistent backup.
Ah yes, I forgot to say the total of all sites is no more than 300MB.
I think you should be pretty happy with our free plan.
Wow, GREAT idea! As a developer I try to setup my clients with an Amazon S3 accounts, but it’s not user friendly and most clients just throw up their hands in frustration and want me to take care of it. I end of storing their backups in my S3 account, not an ideal solution.
I’d love to have the option of providing both Backup Buddy and a secure storage place that they can access without going through me. Looking forward to the Backup Buddy Stash launch!
Carol – thanks – and as a Toolkit customer, we have a special bonus coming for you to with BackupBuddy Stash.
http://ithemes.com/toolkit/
Love it. Any idea what the range of pricing is for the premium plans?
We’re narrowing in on it but it’s a tad early to release. Needless to say it’ll be affordable we think for what developers will want.
Awesome idea guys. Instead of waisting my time trying to get clients to sign up for A3 or Rackspace I just host the backups on my Rackspace account but thats starting to eat into my costs. Even though its fairly cheap its still an expense I’ve been hoping to get rid of. The free stash sounds awesome for most of my clients. Cant wait.
@aronwp
That’s great to hear! It will be per account of course and the free plan will be limited but we think you’ll love it and give you a lot of wiggle room for the price (past the free plan).
well I have a dev licence but I think it will be easier to have clients buy their own site licence for the stash than having them setup an A3 account. Either way I’m excited.
Just wan’t to say that backup buddy has saved me countless hours migrating sites from dev to prod or from one host to another. Even though it’s not hard to migrate sites and run a SQL query to change the url’s backup buddy still saves me allot of time and makes the task simple enough for monkeys to do it. Well…. almost.
@aronwp
What a great idea. I use Amazon S3, and, you’re right, it’s cheap. I think my bill last month was 3.47… and I have a LOT of backups there.
But you are also right that it’s a bit wonky. At least a third of the time, S3 refuses the connection when the auto-upload cron runs. It’s one of the frustrating things about S3, that no one can really control.
To have a space designed especially for BackUpBuddy backups is a perfect answer to run alongside the best Backup solution out there for WordPress – bar none.