ServInt Has Your Golden Ticket! Get Ready for VaultPress on ServInt!
At ServInt, we have thousands of clients who rely on WordPress software to run their business. They’re attracted to its simplicity, its ubiquity, and the myriad of plugins available to scratch nearly any “feature-itch” imaginable. Plus, with our free nightly backups, they have a little extra peace of mind.
Well, that peace of mind just grew 11-fold.
Today, we’re proud to announce that ServInt is one of the exclusive launch partners for VaultPress, the incredible backup and security service developed by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com. Automattic has granted us access to a “Golden Ticket Machine” enabling us to offer all of our clients who are using WordPress access to the VaultPress beta!
VaultPress is a continuous security and backup system that works in real-time to dynamically backup every post, tag, folder, and font change you can make in WordPress. It even picks up on things that WordPress doesn’t, such as files you’ve added via FTP.
VaultPress security monitoring scans uploads, plugins, and themes and alerts you when it detects potential security issues. VaultPress doesn’t just make one backup, either, it goes to 11. Combine that with ServInt’s backup system, and you have 12 distinct backups (though you lose out on the Spinal Tap reference). This level of redundancy virtually ensures you’ll have all your data, all the time.*
Installation? Easy. VaultPress installs just like any other WordPress plugin.
The cost? ServInt will be extending VaultPress’ beta discount to all interested clients, $15 a month for the Basic Level, $40 a month for the Premium Level.
What are you waiting for? Click here to go to ServInt’s Customer Portal and request a Golden Ticket now!
If you aren’t using WordPress, don’t worry. At ServInt, ALL of our VPS, SuperVPS, and Solo Series clients have access to our incremental backup system which offers daily backups for exactly ZERO dollars. Whether it’s your personal computer at home, the critical documents you have at work, or the website living comfortably on your server, backing up your data is an absolute necessity and at ServInt, we make it easy.
For the thousands of ServInt clients who rely on WordPress to run their business, well, now it’s even easier!
So get your Golden Ticket now!
*Unless there’s a robot uprising or zombie infection. ServInt and VaultPress
can’t really help you there.
WordPress Reaches Out
Last Friday, I commented on the outage at WordPress.com.
Over the weekend, WordPress contacted us in response to that post. They took issue with a few points and sent us a heartfelt and thoughtful response outlining some of the work they had done to battle their outage. The conversation was enlightening and caused us to reflect differently on the outage.
As you may know, we’ve never shied away from defending a competitor that was doing the right thing. We were very public in our support for Rackspace — one of our largest competitors and industry colleagues — last year during its series of tragic outages.
We’ve also never had a problem challenging those that weren’t. When a new wave of “solar powered” hosts began targeting eco-oriented blogs and lambasting them for hosting with companies like ServInt, we called them out on it and pointed out our own green credentials.
We have always treated our blog as a public facing forum for ideas, we want readers to know that real people with real emotions and opinions work at ServInt. I think it’s that willingness to engage in constructive and frank conversations that set us apart from other people in this industry who would rather play it safe.
So, thanks again to our friends at WordPress for sharing the information with us that they did. WordPress powers our blog and is the cornerstone of our own Blog VPS line, so it goes without saying that we’re fans and love the platform. As an active member of the Linux Foundation and as open source stewards for more than a decade, we love and admire innovative companies that help make software development free and community driven. The WP staff and community have done great things for the Internet and are clearly talented, brilliant assets to the web.
Here are a couple of the responses the folks at WordPress pointed us to:
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog post detailing the outage.
Again, we appreciate their reaching out and setting the record straight.
Have something to say? Don’t forget to comment! You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
On the WordPress Outage
When I walked into the office today, my various RSS feeds, Twitter apps, and news aggregators were lit up with news of WordPress.com’s outage.
Now, we’ve made our position on the viability of free platforms known before. They’re great if you’re just goofing around, but they’re not so great if you’re trying to make a living. WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs, the vast majority of them being relatively simple “Here’s what I’m having for lunch” fare, and that’s absolutely fine.
However, they host lots of popular blogs and they have a VIP program with some pretty big names including TechCrunch, GigaOM, and a couple of CNN’s blogs. Those are sites that have a lot of users counting on them and WordPress made them look really bad today. With almost no outward communication other than a cheeky 404 page, a lot of businesses were in the dark about why their sites were down.
Outages happen, we get that, and we certainly don’t fault WordPress.com or Matt (Mullenweg, WordPress founder) for what happened without knowing more details. We love WordPress at ServInt – we use WordPress software right here on this blog – and we truly appreciate their contributions to open source. WordPress does not, to my knowledge, have any sort of issue with recurring outages. By and large, they have been extraordinarily successful, historically stable, and until last night their millions of users were probably 100% happy.
But, this outage is yet another example of the danger small businesses have when they rely purely on free services, and it’s also further proof that many of these services simply don’t understand the need for urgency in keeping their users informed. I understand not wanting to jump the gun and announce speculative or preliminary information, but the fact that really nothing was said is troubling.
I know this is going to sound incredibly cheesy but it’s true; ServInt has nothing but VIP clients.
Because we’re accountable to each and every one of our customers, and because we have an exchange of goods and an associated Service Level Agreement, we have a vested personal and financial interest in ensuring that you stay up as close to 100% of the time as is physically possible. As a result, our VPS and SuperVPS platform has an average of five 9′s of uptime (99.999%). We’re not perfect – those five 9′s aren’t a 1 and two zero’s – but we do everything we can to get as close to perfection as possible.
ServInt already hosts incredibly popular blogs like Android and Me, Sports by Brooks, and The Mac Observer, just to name a few, so rest assured that this is an apples to apples comparison. This isn’t so much a criticism of WordPress as a company; after all they make a great product and are a tremendous benefit to the internet as a community. This is a larger critique of companies that treat hosting as little more than cheap, forgettable infrastructure. It’s like building a mansion on clay instead of concrete; you learn – quickly – that skimming costs off of your foundation is a bad idea.
People come to us so they can start small and grow. We’re a service company that manages the foundational infrastructure of the web. Because we do what we do so well, incredibly powerful and complex sites can grow and thrive, make lots of money, and spawn even more terrific sites. When a foundation is solid, success is contagious, WordPress as a platform is a great example of that. Their hosting infrastructure and communication, however, has room for improvement.
I don’t want this to sound vindictive, nor is my aim to “poach” customers or do some sort of “rescue” pitch to angry WordPress clients. Events like this make our industry look bad as a whole, and I’m saddened whenever a company as stellar as WordPress drops the ball.
When real hosts – people who know this business – have a catastrophic outage, they’re communicative, responsive, and as transparent as possible. Companies that take their hosting customers for granted quickly prove they have a lot to learn.
Think I’m way off base? Let me know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.
Follow Us!
