To Protect and Secure

Peter Askew runs DudeRanch.com, which promotes dude ranches as a vacation destination to the traveling public. He’s a self-hosted WordPress user and a fan of open-source software.
— Paul, one of the VaultPress Safekeepers

My primary WordPress site is DudeRanch.com, which chronicles dude ranch vacation destinations across the USA and Canada. Most folks aren’t familiar with a dude ranch vacation, so we enjoy helping educate everyone on all the options a ranch has to offer (in addition to horseback riding).

My initial exposure to WordPress took several years as I traveled the long road into website development. I’m originally a Southern Studies/History graduate of Ole Miss (Hotty Toddy), so my initial background in computer science and website administration was extremely limited. I was exposed to the web during the dotcom boom of the late 90’s, and during that time I developed a deep passion for the industry. Over the next few years, I managed to teach myself HTML & CSS, and, from there, I was exposed to WordPress as a blog and CMS platform. I was initially attracted to WordPress because of its open source nature and its ability to manage and maintain a website within an easy to understand interface.

Customization and ease of use are what I value most about WordPress. I also highly value the WordPress development team as they continue to evolve and update WordPress for the growing needs of website administrators.

After I built the site, my main focus shifted to backup and security. With over six months of development time and thousands of hours devoted to maintenance and administration, I took a proactive step to ensure the site’s safety. Once I discovered VaultPress, and its ability to provide realtime backups, downloadable archives, and disaster recovery, matched with the fact that it’s operated & administered by the Automattic team, the decision to join was easy. The installation was a breeze, and I’ve now been a happy client for almost six months! 🙂

Check out DudeRanch.com here. If you’re a VaultPress customer and you’d like to be featured in one of our future VaultPress stories, please drop us a line. Thanks Pete!

Jesse Liberty is a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft in the Developer Guidance Group. His current focus is the Full Stack Project that he is creating with Jon Galloway. His WordPress blog lives at JesseLiberty.com.
— Paul, one of the VaultPress Safekeepers

My primary WordPress site is JesseLiberty.com, which serves as my blog and connection to the Silverlight, Windows Phone and technical community. I also host my podcast off this blog and generally make it the center of my work for Microsoft Developer Guidance.

I started with bulletin board systems back in the early 1980’s, progressed to writing my own, including threaded discussion centers, but really came into blogging in the late 1990’s. By 2007, I had a full time blog for Microsoft which I migrated to WordPress in early 2010, bringing my old entries along.

WordPress offered me much greater control with much less work, and I’ve been extremely happy with WordPress as a platform. My only concern, and it was significant, was that I could not seem to work out a fully dependable backup that would reliably restore my site to a previous state if needed. VaultPress seemed to be the right answer, and wow, was it ever.

In February of 2011, my blog was badly infected by a virus, that returned repeatedly despite our very best efforts to harden the site. To make a long story short, in desperation I decided to export and re-import the entire site, but when I was done, the site was badly corrupted, with most entries showing only the first sentence or two. Holding back my panic, I wiped out my entire directory structure, and deleted all my files and my databases, and used VaultPress to restore. Within a couple hours not only was my site back up online, but it was virus-free.

I owe VaultPress a lot, not the least of which is my sanity.

Check out Jesse Liberty’s blog here. If you’re a VaultPress customer and you’d like to be featured in one of our future VaultPress stories, please drop us a line. Thanks Jesse!

Alex Rodriguez is based in Miami, Florida, and specializes in wedding and bridal fashion photography. He’s worked throughout the Caribbean, Europe, Central America, South America and North America and been featured in Grace Ormonde’s Wedding Style magazine. His professional blog is Alex Rodriguez Photography.
— Paul, one of the VaultPress Safekeepers

My primary WordPress site is a blog for my photography business. On the site I feature some of my recent work which focuses on my wedding photography. I occasionally blog about some personal issues that are of importance to me. My site provides the perfect way to feature some of my recent work and for my clients to preview some of the work they have commissioned me to do prior to me delivering the final project.

In a prior life, I was very involved in UNIX administration and have always been very comfortable running my own apps. When I started blogging I turned to Blogger. At first, their support was exceptional, but following their acquisition, it became nonexistent. As my business started to depend more and more on my blog, I started to research alternatives, and it quickly became clear a self-hosted WordPress site was exactly what I was looking for. I could customize it with plugins and themes all while maintaining complete control. Support was also top notch — the community of theme and plugin developers provided the best support I could find.

Simplicity and reliability are what I value most about WordPress. WordPress is a solid application that has matured into a robust platform and is now an essential part of my business.

I became interested in VaultPress because I am always traveling and my greatest concern is exposure to security vulnerabilities. I am often unable to apply an update or patch as quickly as I would like but with the Security Monitoring built in to VaultPress, I know critical vulnerabilities are covered for me. I was also able to replace a less robust backup plugin with the backup/snapshot functionality of VaultPress. I am very comfortable knowing that all of this is done and supported by the experts at Automattic.

As for tips for other WordPress bloggers, make sure to blog often, it’s the best way to engage your audience! My current must have plugins are Jetpack (Site Stats, Gravatar Hovercards, After the Deadline, Sharedaddy), Akismet, Google Analytics for WordPress, Google XML Sitemaps, and W3 Total Cache.

Check out Alex Rodriguez Photography here. If you’re a VaultPress customer and you’d like to be featured in one of our future VaultPress stories, please drop us a line. Thanks Alex!