The Most Important WordPress Plugin
In my last post I mentioned the reason for using WordPress for a new corporate web site was the numerous and rich 3rd partry applications that support their websites and blogs. Somehow in the post I failed to mention the most important plugin, database backup. I learned this the hard way when I mistakenly uploaded my new Connexius.com MySQL database to my live chrispoer.com MySQL database. I host both websites on the same account at GoDaddy and I selected the wrong database when loading the new Connexius website. I have religously backed up the HTML files, but somehow I never thought about backing up the database which is the heart of WordPress.
So which is the best backup plugin? I did a search on “DB backup” and selected “DB Cron Backup” based solely on the WP recommendations provided. I can say that it is easy to install, configure, and operate and indeed backup files are being created when I asked them to be created. Hopefully they are good files and in the event of another failure they will restore my system. I actually have not been brave enough to test it and do a restore.
I almost titles this blog why I am going to leave GoDaddy as my website hosting provider. While I admit the DB failure is 100% my fault, I would expect that GoDaddy has a reasonable backup and restoration system. The good news is that they can restore the system to any day and time you request. The bad news is that it costs $150 and they said it would take 7-10 business days to manually pull the files off their offsite storage facility. Does that sound right to you?