We are currently using managewp and today it was probably down 5-7 times. We rely very much on Managewp as we host and manage over 250 websites. We have been looking into MainWP for a while now and looked into pricing ect… We finally decided to move over because mostly everything is better and more costly… We have started to move over a few sites today and when we wanted to test how everything works, for example the security and backups. We then came to the conclusion that backups is very expensive when you need storage. We currently have 250 sites, lets say 240 of them do normal monthly backups and is around 300-500mb, thats fine. But then we have around 10 sites, where one of them is almost 10gb doing hourly backups, and a retention period of 3 months, thats about 21TB for just that site alone…
Any help on this? Or is it better to stay by managewp, as they don’t even charge us what the cheapest (that we know of) storage is that we need.
I’ve switched from ManageWP to MainWP almost 10 years ago, but used ManageWP still until a year ago for a side project. I can’t remember I saw any development in these last 10 years, so that’s a big reason why I love MainWP.
Regarding the backups I don’t think hourly backups of a 10GB site is a good idea. It would be creating backups all the time what would create a big extra load and that would slow down the website.
I think you should limit the backup to the database and maybe some crucial files (that change a lot and are very important). The rest of the files can have a much lower frequency and maybe incremental backups.
It would not only save a lot of disk space, server load and network traffic, but would also be much better for the environment reducing the carbon footprint.
A website that is so big and apparently so important (for hourly backups) will probably hosted on a good server and should have other backup options as well. Backups on server level would be much more efficient.
So currently we have an API that pushes media files to the website daily, we are rebuilding the API so that it only uploads if there is new media files, and not to do it daily even if it exists…
Ok lets say we do daily backups on this site, and its hosted by cloudways so server backups also. What would you suggest is the best way to do the of server backups?
For smaller sites we use All in one WP migration backup plugin on our 2.5 TB pCloud, which we have Lifetime Deal licence, and for some really big sites we also use BlogVault but it is very very expensive when you have more sites to backup, so we try to use All in one as much as possible.
I use rsync to do server-level backups of all my sites. I set it up a while ago, but if I recall I used a variation on a script suggested here:
My largest site is about 10 GB, and there’s usually no issue doing hourly backups. Not much changes, so there’s not a lot of bandwidth (or disk) usage doing incremental backups. rsync spends a little bit of server resources checking the filesystem for changes, but I have not seen it interfere with the performance of the servers at all. The backups are going to a machine sitting in my home office, so I am not paying any additional hosting fees for a backup server. My only additional cost was an inexpensive 4TB external hard drive.
I imagine a solution like this is not perfect for everyone—with a good managed host you might be best to use the backup services they offer—but for those who host on bare metal or VPS servers, where there’s already a fair amount of work to be done at the server level, a little backup script running as a cronjob using a tool like rsync might be a good choice. I know I’ve been happy with it.
@devon I want to add to Kenneths suggestion.
We use BackBlaze B2 storage as our back end storage provider. B2 storage is AWS S3 compatible. It is also a lot less expensive than Google, MS, AWS etc. They’ve been in business a very long time (I think Ive been with them over 10 years) nad we have had zero issues.
Using RClone instead of rSync I can use an RSync like backup but it backends to cloud storaage providers. In effect I get all the beauty of rSync with cloud Storage.
I presently backup using a NAS box sitting next to my desk as a local (to me) back end so I can quickly grab files for dev purposes. I also backup to BackBlaze. I can restore BB files using RClone in reverse. I can also wade through them using CyberDuck or similar tools.
Adapting the TimeMachine backup script above to use RClone would be reasonably trivial.
RClone also backends to Dropbox. My wordpress sites are using UpDraft WordPress plugin and dumping to Dropbox. RClone also can use dropbox which gives you the joy of replication etc.
I’ve used Duplicity / Duplicaty etc but quite frankly RSync / RClone nad Cron rock my world.
I manage over 60 websites - plus email for dozens of companies (SmarterMail, iRedMail, ISPConfig Mail setup etc) rClone handles them all. I sleep well at night and in the morning I check a folder to see how many emails appear with the word success in them. I can also script reports to different monitoring systems to get a heads up in my dashboards plus use alert services if its crucial.