I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving holiday to it’s fullest extent by spending lot’s of time with friends and family, shopping their hearts out, decorating the home and lastly resting enough to sleep off the turkey coma.
For me, my Thanksgiving holiday was spent doing much less fun things. On Thanksgiving eve I logged into one of my sites and noticed it had a few updates that needed to be installed. So, as I normally do, I clicked button to install the updates and everything went downhill from there. Because the sites were not updated in over a month due to me being out of the country with limited to no internet access, the updates did not get installed in a timely manner and it allowed for my sites to get attacked/hacked.
Since the site was on a shared server, the attacks shut down 8 of my sites and took me several days of work to get them back up & running again with the help of Sucuri to clean up the malware. (affiliate) Granted, most of the sites that got attacked were not used for much other than testing things for my clients custom WordPress sites, but some of the ones affected were rather important to my online presence.
In particular, one site I was very upset to see attacked was the new product reviews site I built, New Shiny Object. This site reviews products that you may want to purchase and with it being just a few days from the busiest time of the year for shopping, I wanted this site along with all my other ones back up & running as soon as possible.
Most of my sites had a free backup plugin installed that keeps a copy of the content on the site alone & emails it to you. But, the design customizations, installed plugins, and SEO work does not get backed up in the file it sends. Luckily for me, the most important site was able to be restored quickly & easily because of my recent change in back up services. The new service offers the ability to backup not only the content of the website, but also a full backup of everything to an Amazon S3 cloud server.
A quick download of the file and install back to the server and that site was back online. The other sites on the other hand took countless hours of work on my behalf to restore settings, plugins, themes etc. So, instead of it taking hours like my other sites, New Shiny Object was back up & running in just a few minutes.
Back in July I soft launched the WordPress backup service to my clients as well because of the tremendous value I saw in it. I soft launched it to make sure that I knew what I was doing, and also to really test the system and make sure everything worked the way it said it should. Well, after several months testing around 15 clients and after the events of this past weekend, I think it is time to start offering this service to more and more people.
That being said, here is what the new backup service includes:
- Daily database backups to an Amazon S3 server with the 14 most recent days saved.
- Full site backup (database, files, plugins, theme customizations, the works) saved on Amazon S3 servers every two weeks. (most recent 2 full backups kept minimum)
- Full Restoration service of site in case of attack.
- Daily email notifications that site has been backed up.
- Email notifications if there is an error reported during backup.
- Access to Sucuri Malware scanner inside WordPress dashboard to scan your site for malware manually.
Pricing for this is being offered as either month to month or annually. If you have more than one site you would like to have backed up, your second site is less.