Newbies - Don't Make This Mistake!

So a hacker got into one of my WordPress websites recently and absolutely destroyed it. Unfortunately, I hadn't been backing up that particular website. I had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Arghh!

This got me thinking. My websites are my livelihood just as any "brick and mortar" physical business is to other professionals. My websites provide for my family just as any other physical business does. And most importantly, my websites are vulnerable to theft and vandalism just as any physical business is.

So why don't I protect my websites as I would a physical business? Physical businesses have fire insurance, fire extinguishers, flood insurance, physical alarms, etc. My websites should have the equivalent protections in place.

And the best protection is a good backup system.

Anyway, I did some research and found a great (free) wordpress plugin that I wanted to share with everyone. This plugin backs up databases as well as everything in your wp-content folders. It can create a local folder in your hosting account for the backup files, but it can also backup to dropbox or Amazon S3 (this is what I do). Here's the best part. You can schedule the plugin to do automatic backups.


It's 100% free, and I now use this solution on all my websites.

You can download it from WordPress.org.
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/updraft/

Now, the backing up part is pretty user-friendly, but the re-installing from the backup part requires some technical proficiency. If you know how to manually migrate a WordPress website, then you'll have no problems with this plugin. But if you don't know how to manually migrate a WordPress website, then you may want to consider a more user -friendly commercial solution. In any case, this is the best free solution I could find.

By the way, a few weeks after I installed this plugin on all my websites, I had another catastrophe. I installed a new theme on a blog, and the theme corrupted the website to the point where none of the pages would load. I couldn't even get into the WordPress dashboard to deactivate the theme. It was a disaster! Thankfully, the site was backed up this time...

Oh, and that original website that I had to rebuild... well I had been wanting to rebuild the website anyway with a contextual advertising model rather than CPA. So I took the opportunity to do just that, and the website became much more profitable than it had been. There was a silver lining to that whole incident!

Anyway, for the veterans out there... I'm wondering if there are any other solutions out there, free or paid, that you would recommend. What do you guys use?


Take care!

Tim Culpepper