When you operate your WordPress site on one host and need to move it to another, it’s not as simple as you might think. Every instance of WordPress has four elements: the infrastructure and IP address it’s hosted at, the MySQL database that contains your content, the uploaded files, themes and plugins, and WordPress itself.
WordPress has an import and export mechanism, but it’s restricted to actual content. It doesn’t maintain author integrity, and doesn’t migrate your options – which are at the heart of virtually any installation. Long story short… it’s a real pain!
BlogVault
Utilizing BlogVault, I loaded the plugin on my source site, added my email address for notifications, and then entered my new URL and FTP credentials. I clicked migrate… and a few minutes later I had an email in my inbox that the site was migrated.
I literally didn’t have to do anything… all the options, users, files, etc. were properly migrated over to the new server! Aside from their incredible migration tool, BlogVault is a full backup service that also offers other features:
- Test Restore: Do you want to revert to a previous version of your site? But how do you know if that is indeed the right one? BlogVault allows you to load the chosen backup version to any of their test servers, and you can see it working like a real website.
- Auto Restore: No matter if your website is compromised or a human error has caused a failure, BlogVault will always be by your side to get you back up quickly. The Auto-Restore feature automatically restores the backup to the server in your hour of need without requiring manual intervention.
- Security: BlogVault guarantees 100% safety by storing multiple copies of your backup in a location that is independent of your website. Your backup, which is encrypted, is stored in secure data centers and also on Amazon S3 servers. Unlike regular Amazon S3 usage, they don’t store the credentials as part of the site, thereby mitigating any potential hacks.
- History: BlogVault maintains a 30-day history of your backups so that you can access them at any time.
- Backups: BlogVault adopts an incremental approach to the backup, restore, and migration process. Whether BlogVault is migrating, backing up, or restoring a site, it only works with what’s changed since the last sync. This saves time and bandwidth.
