This month, iThemes celebrates 8 years of business and serving you with some of the BIGGEST news I’ve ever shared.
In 2010, when we first launched BackupBuddy, it was a game changer for WordPress, for you, and for us, primarily because nothing like it truly existed. BackupBuddy was the first plugin to give you an all-in-one solution to backup, restore and move WordPress sites with a few clicks.
Since then, we continued to develop and push new features to BackupBuddy, helping make your life easier, while protecting your vital sites and content.
Now … I’m excited to say, after months and months of hard work by our team, BackupBuddy will make yet another game changing splash as we release Stash Live in BackupBuddy 7.0, which all current customers with an active subscription will get.
In fact, we think Stash Live will go down as one of the biggest launches we’ve had because of the awesome impact it’ll have for you, our awesome community.
So I wanted to give you a glimpse into what is coming …
What is Stash Live?
Stash Live is a new real-time backup feature that will be included in BackupBuddy 7.0.
Essentially, Stash Live is a new way to make automated daily backups in BackupBuddy that takes a big load off your own server. We’ve just optimized BackupBuddy to work in many of the worst hosting environments.
The new Stash Live feature makes a real-time backup of your site, streaming your database and files over to our new Live online service where you can make a Snapshot (a BackupBuddy zip file) of your full site, your database, your plugins and your themes.
Then you can download the zip files locally, or send your files to BackupBuddy Stash for long-term, off-site storage.
Why Is Stash Live a Game Changer?
For years, we’ve battled the slow, painful decline of the shared hosting industry (and so have you). As WordPress has grown, shared hosting companies have sought to limit resource usage on their platforms in order to squeeze out profits on their cheapest plans.
The result? More crappy hosting, which means you’ve probably encountered more problems trying to use WordPress and essential plugins on your sites.
So this summer, we decided instead of waiting for hosting companies to change (it’ll never happen honestly; it’s only going to get worse) to do something about it FOR YOU.
The obstacle is the opportunity. And we’re putting that belief to work with Stash Live coming in BackupBuddy 7.0.
So we took off the biggest pain point and problem (CPU usage / Disk I/O) we’ve had with slow, shared hosts and developed our own service to make backups work better for you on those problematic platforms.
tl;dr — We’re eliminating the primary obstacle you’ve had backing up your sites (or your client’s sites) on slow, resource-limited shared hosting with the upcoming rollout of BackupBuddy 7.0.
All the great features you’ve come to love and trust in BackupBuddy are staying the same … we’re just adding a BIG NEW feature to your backup strategy, Stash Live.
You get to make critical backups of your online work without problems and headaches. The shared hosting companies love that someone else’s resources are being used to do it. And we get to make your life easier and protect your work.
It’s a win for everyone!
When Is It Coming?
Soon. We’re currently deep into testing this version as we do every iThemes release. We’ll be sending more updates very soon.
See A Sneak Preview of BackupBuddy 7.0
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Founder of iThemes.com
Congrats on the coming launch! A few thoughts from having some experience with a similar product in the space:
1. Hosting is actually getting better, thanks to Moore’s law and better technology segregating customers. Most sites don’t double their traffic every 18 months, so it becomes cheaper and cheaper to host them over time. Storage is also getting cheaper every year, and faster I/O as most hosts standardize on SSDs, something that was exotic and rare even just a few years ago.
2. Host backups are getting better. It was an after-thought for many before, but has really improved. That said, I 100% agree that if you’re serious about your site than you should have a backup plan for their backup plan (to reference another BB, Big Boi), and a third-party plugin or service (like Stash) is a good approach for that.
3. People who opt to pay for really crappy hosting (it is out there) are also less likely to pay for quality add-on services. If they were serious about their site, they would have gone with a better host in the first place.
Matt, thanks for stopping by and chiming in. Like I’ve mentioned when we’ve talked before, I’ve always respected your opinion and perspective even when we’ve disagreed at times, which I try not to make a habit of doing with smart people. 🙂
1. I agree, managed WP hosting is pretty awesome. Our friends at WPEngine and Pagely continue to innovate and do great things. But from our perspective, it’s hard to see that in the shared hosting space, especially as I look back over the last 8 years at iThemes. There are two essentially gigantic players in shared hosting now. One, struggling very much, still, from all we can see … and another, trying hard with good leadership, and tons of promise, who have sought to work with us instead of against us. I agree the technology is getting better, and thus shared hosting should too. But I’ve seen too many systematic examples of empty promises and outright neglect over the last 8 years as I’ve sought to work with the shared hosts for the benefit of our mutual customers. Call me cynical, but every time they’ve said they would get better, they don’t. And my job is to protect our community. But I’ll hold out some hope they will get better!
2. Woot! To me, it’s all about freedom by having full control of your online work. You’ve been a champion of the user’s rights and I appreciate that very much.
3. Absolutely. I wish they valued their online work more.
Thanks again, Matt, for stopping by and seeing what we’re up to and offering valuable insight. Hope we can do lunch again soon!
Congrats on the launch. A SaaS solution is really smart and a great way to provide consistent results across the board. I’m excited for you and your team, Cory.
Thanks Chris!
Very cool, Stash Live sounds incredibly powerful. We recently started using Stash so I’m excited about the new capabilities.
Ross, so glad you’re taking advantage of our remote storage option! More to come!
Hi,
I’m uploading backups to Google Drive. Can I use Stash Live functionallity in Google Drive or it only works on your Stash platform?
Thanks and best regards.
Hi Alex, Stash Live is a unique service designed to work with BackupBuddy, BackupBuddy Stash and iThemes Sync. But you can continue using Google Drive with “traditional” BackupBuddy backups.