Automattic Opens Up VaultPress, A Safe Place To Back Up Your Blog

Over the past few months, Automattic’s popular blog platform WordPress.com has taken an in-depth look at their blogging ecosystem, and realized that one of the major pain points for the 12.1 million users who self-host their WordPress blogs is security and restoration. WordPress.com backs up all of the blogs that it hosts, but those users who self-host their WordPress-powered blogs need to download outside plugins, such as this one, or use backup services like Mozy or Backupify to protect their data and content. Today Automattic is changing that with the launch of its own blog protection and restoration service for self-hosted blogs, called VaultPress.

Currently in private beta, VaultPress is a plugin users can download that acts as a backup service for your blog. Not only will the software help keep your blog up and running, but it will also soon monitor your site to alert you if their is suspicious activity or a hacking. Alternatively, VaultPress will eventually update your blog with security hot-fixes automatically. VaultPress will be a paid service and will probably be in the ballpark range of $15 to 20 per month, according to Automattic VP of User Growth Paul Kim. At first VaultPress will be extended on an invitation only basis and will eventually be open to the public in the near future.

While users can still use outside services or WordPress community plugins, VaultPress will be the only WordPress.com branded offering. And the plugin is tightly woven into WordPress.com infrastructure, promising greater operability, says Kim.

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg says VaultPress is one of the most advanced technologies that he’s seen interact with WordPress. The vision of the service is to ensure that every piece of content on WordPress-powered blogs and sites are safe, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups.

VaultPress as a product makes sense for WordPress.com and frankly, I’m surprised that the blogging platform didn’t roll this out earlier.

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