14 DAY TRIAL // Hosting your own blog has plenty of advantages and plenty of people enjoy the flexibility and the freedom that provides. No one knows this better than Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com. But with the freedom comes greater responsibility, if something goes wrong you’re on your own. But there’s hope yet, one that doesn’t require all that much effort on your part, and it’s called VaultPress. From the makers of WordPress itself, the automatic backup system is now opening its doors a little wider and inviting more people into the closed beta.
“Over the weekend we started to trickle out the first Golden Ticket invites to VaultPress. This means that if you’re on the list you now have a semi-random chance of being one of the first people who can sleep more soundly at night because of VaultPress,” Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic, announced.
“The real-time nature, security aspects, and robustness of VaultPress means that it has lots of moving bits, so we’re controlling the growth of the service through the invite system. We’ve started out by sending out 30 invites a day and will gradually grow that over the next few months,” he explained.
VaultPress is a WordPress plugin that provides automatic backups for self-hosted WordPress blogs. It’s key feature is ease of use and integration with the software platform. The backups are hosted on WordPress.com’s infrastructure, which now holds more than 200 million blog posts, so there should be no worries on that part. Of course, no service is safe from outages, but WordPress.com’s record is rather solid.
Eventually, VaultPress will offer some increased security as well by providing automatic updates for WordPress and even fending off some types of attacks. Automattic has a target price of $15 per month for VaultPress, but this may change by the time the service goes out of beta, which may be some months from now.