A Hero for Every Site

Posted on Oct2010

Yesterday, we began rolling out a fresh round of advertising, and we wanted to take a moment to talk about the story behind it (we are bloggers, after all).

Deciding how to advertise a totally new product is a tall order. When your job is providing security and peace of mind, there’s two pretty obvious marketing strategies: fear or empowerment. You can scare your users into using your product, or you can make using your product feeling empowering. And VaultPress does just that. When you entrust your site to the VaultPress Safekeepers, you know you’re covered. Whether you’re a personal or professional blogger, business owner or IT manager, WordPress and VaultPress are an incredible team that make maintaining your website completely hassle-free. And yes, sometimes trouble does strike. But when it does, you’ll have the VaultPress Safekeepers on your site, ensuring your heroic victory in the battle of Good vs. Evil.

So to drive that point home, illustrator Matthew Woodson has created the first in a new series of VaultPress Heroes. We alluded to this idea when we started advertising the service, and we’ll continue to evolve it over the next few months. We hope you enjoy the new art, but most importantly we hope you’ll enjoy the peace of mind achieved from teaming up with VaultPress.

Posted in Meta | Tagged | 2 Comments

New VaultPress Account Tools

Posted on Oct2010

We’ve just turned on a brand new accounts page for all VaultPress customers. Previously, you had to email us to change your credit card information, request a receipt, upgrade your plan, and so on. Now you can manage your VaultPress account directly from the Account page, accessible at the top right of your VaultPress dashboard.

Screenshot of VaultPress account page

Here’s an overview of what you can do:

  • Change your credit card details. If you need to enter a different credit card, or update the information for your current card, you can do that here.
  • View/print receipts. Many of our customers need receipts for documentation reasons at their companies.
  • Modify your plan. You can easily switch between our Basic and Premium plans.
  • View next billing date. Confirm the next billing date for your subscription.
  • View all accounts. If you manage multiple VaultPress secured sites, you can view all your account info for each of your sites here.

The new accounts page is live for all customers now. Let us know how you like it, and what else you’d like to see us add to it, in the comments below.

Posted in Announcements, Features | Tagged , | 1 Comment

VPS.NET Partners with VaultPress

Posted on Oct2010

Our friends at VPS.NET have just turned on their partner golden ticket machine for VaultPress, and are now making these golden tickets available to all of their hosting clients. We’re excited to bring them on as a partner as we continue to roll the VaultPress beta out to more customers.

Posted in Announcements, Partnerships | Tagged , | 1 Comment

WPEngine and VaultPress

Posted on Oct2010

As you may have heard on TechCrunch, when you sign up for an account at WPEngine you also get a golden ticket giving you the opportunity to be one of the first customers of VaultPress. They, and one other host that hasn’t launched yet, have access to what we’re calling the “golden ticket machine” internally. It’s basically a way for select partners to bypass the normal waiting list.

With a bit more beta experience (and a lot more BBQ) under our belt, we’ve been working on partnerships to bring VaultPress to more professional WordPress site owners. After getting feedback from several full-time WordPress consultants who manage sites for many clients, we are also working on getting our new “VaultPress Pro” system up and running. So far the biggest requests have been for a unified admin view, the ability for clients to pay directly for VaultPress, and affiliate participation (all of which we dig too). If you have more than 5 clients you’d like to Vault and have some other ideas, let us know in the comments!

Posted in Announcements, Partnerships | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Bringing Stats to the Vault

Posted on Oct2010

“I’d rather die enormous than live dormant.”
– Jay-Z

Serious bloggers live and die by their data. If you blog professionally, you know that tracking your post visits, referrals, and comments helps you learn and adapt so you can make your blog better.

When you sign up for VaultPress, we build a tight connection with your WordPress site so we can back up and secure all of your WordPress content and data. That realtime connection to your site also enables us to pull together some interesting stats. Today, we’re announcing the first release of VaultPress stats, available immediately for all of our beta customers on their VaultPress dashboards.

VaultPress stats complement stats packages you may already be running, like the WordPress.com stats plugin or Google Analytics.

For our first stats release, we’ve focused on three areas where VaultPress can help you:

Blogging Intelligence

Because VaultPress backs up activity on your blog in realtime, we can help you understand time-based patterns. What time of day do you blog most often? What day of the week do you blog the most? We’ve crunched these numbers for you so you can see at a glance when you’re most productive. Our blogging intelligence stats are displayed in what we’ve nicknamed the “Data Fortune Cookie” area at the top of the new stats page. We’ll be adding more fortune cookies over time, so let us know if you have ideas for other things that you’d like to see us track.

Vital Signs

The heart of the new VaultPress stats display is a dynamic chart that shows at a glance everything that’s happened on your blog since you started synchronizing with VaultPress. We show you, over time, every post, page, comment, and upload, and we call this measure your site’s Vitality. Hover over any point in time and you’ll see an instant report overlaid on the graph with the activity that happened at that time. This is your new stats nerve center – all of the activity on your WordPress site, in one easy to understand chart.

Global Stats

We’ve started tracking VaultPress community stats, and we’ll be sharing this aggregated, anonymized data periodically so you can get the pulse of what some of the most advanced WordPress users in the world are into. We’ll share how much total data we’re backing up, including posts, comments, uploads, and more, as well as what the most popular plugins and themes are.

It’s been said you can’t improve what you don’t measure. We hope you get a strong signal on things you can make better through our new VaultPress stats, available now on your VaultPress dashboard.

Posted in Announcements, Features, Stats | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments