Automatically Back Up Your WordPress Blog with VaultPress

Hosting your own blog comes with a lot of freedoms and is sure to score you a few extra points with the geek crowd. But it also comes with a lot of responsibilities, not the least of which is scrambling to recover your data when something goes wrong.

Cautious bloggers use some sort of backup system to ensure that their precious posts are safe and, now, WordPress users have a very interesting option coming from Automattic itself, the company behind WordPress.com and the open-source WordPress blogging platform. Dubbed VaultPress, the WordPress plug-in offers automatic backups of your entire blog, but it will eventually provide protection in case of attacks and even automatic updates.

"The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. This is some of the most advanced technology I’ve seen interact with WordPress," Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and creator of WordPress, explained on the newly launched VaultPress blog.

VaultPress is a WordPress plug-in aimed at bloggers who host their own sites. At its core, it offers backup services for WordPress blogs and boasts deep integration with the blogging software ensuring that everything gets saved, including other plug-ins.

However, future versions will get more advanced features and will be able to notify you if VaultPress determines that your blog has been compromised or damaged in any way and even act to fix the issue. What's more, it will also be able to automatically update WordPress to ensure that you're always running the most secure version. VaultPress is now in private beta and is only available through an invitation. Mullenweg says that the service got 600 applications within the first couple of hours after being launched. When it will be available publicly, it should cost somewhere between $15 to $20 per month.