I left a comment on TechCrunch that a lot of people liked, so I thought I’d reproduce it here. This is in response to “There are a lot of free backup plugins and services, why would I use VaultPress?”
There are tons of great, free backup plugins.
VaultPress does more, though:
- 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.
It’s a complete solution — once VaultPress is running you don’t have to worry about anything except creating a great site.
The only thing I’d add for that is that I don’t want to entrust my backups to a free service. I want to know there’s a business on the other end whose livelihood is making sure my backups are 100% secure as long as I can pay them, not just until their VC funding runs out or they figure out how to monetize the eyeballs of all their free users.
That’s actually why we decided to take a different business model approach with VaultPress. Most of Automattic’s services are freemium, meaning the core product is free with premium upgrades available. That just didn’t seem appropriate as we imagine how we imagined VaultPress evolving over the next 5 years — it’s a high-end product, for high-end users.
I’m a geek and I outsource very little of my tech life, that’s why I host my own blog on my own server, but peace of mind is something I don’t mind paying for.
VaultPress Blog 