Pantheon, one of the largest managed hosting platforms for Drupal and WordPress sites, today announced that it has acquired NodeSquirrel, a backup service for Drupal sites. The service originally started as an extension for Drupal, which is currently in use by over 300,000 sites. Going forward, Pantheon will continue to invest in the product and it’s raising the caps on all of NodeSquirrel’s free and paid tiers.
“We have always had a big vision for what could be possible with NodeSquirrel. With Pantheon’s support, those dreams are going to become reality. Our shared vision of great, easy-to-use tools for developers and agencies make this an incredible opportunity,” said Drew Gorton, co-founder of NodeSquirrel. Gorton and his co-founder Ronan Dowling, who wrote the first version of the open source Backup and Migrate extension at the core of the service more than seven years ago, will join the Pantheon team, as well as a number of other core contributors.
NodeSquirrel launched in 2012 and supports backups to any FTP server, Amazon’s S3 storage service and, of course, NodeSquirrel’s own storage service. Pantheon plans to bring support for incremental backups and large file footprints to the service.
Maybe thanks to the popularity of Backup and Migrate, there aren’t a lot of specialized commercial Drupal backup services on the market. WordPress users can choose from a wider variety of vendors, including the likes of blogVault and WordPress.com’s own VaultPress.
Too many website owners, however, are still backing up their sites locally — which really isn’t a backup at all. Pantheon users already get offsite backups as part of their plans, but as Pantheon CEO and co-founder Zack Rosen says, “acquiring NodeSquirrel gives Pantheon the ability to make secure offsite backups freely available to every Drupal website on the planet.”
The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. As far as we are aware, NodeSquirrel never took any outside investment.