Auto-backup your blog with Amazon S3

Since the last time we suffered a major downtime due to a DDOS attack, been looking for a more pro-active way to make multiple back-ups of the site. Recently, I discovered you can also do automatic back-ups using Amazon S3 as well.

What I’ve been doing before was making automatic on-site backups which are stored on the secondary drive of the same dedicated server. However, if the server is down or is being attacked, you can’t access the secondary drive as well.

We’ve also been making not-so-regular remote back-ups to another server which works fine but could be expensive in the long run since the storage racks-up pretty quickly.

The more affordable solution was with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), an online storage service offered by Amazon. It’s one of the most reliable and most importantly it’s much cheaper since you only pay for space and bandwidth you use.

Luckily, there’s also a WordPress plugin for that (download here) so it’s just a quick install and set up. If you have an Amazon account, you can just login and activate your S3 account as well.

As for pricing, you only pay like $0.15 per GB of storage and another $0.15 per GB of bandwidth transfers. They also charge per server requests but that’s like $0.01 per 1,000 requests so it’s almost negligible if you only do it once a day.

In my case, the blog’s back-up is compressed from about 2GB to just around 450MB and stored as a back-up daily with a unique copy for each day in the last 30 days.

My rough computation is that after 30 days, I’d be consuming around 15GB of storage and another 15GB of bandwidth for file transfers. Amazon’s usage calculator estimated I’d be billed $4.51 for the month. Not bad, huh?

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

11 Comments

blundstone shoes says:

13 years ago

Blah, stop the spam.
- Reply
Tristan says:

13 years ago

I will be signing up for Amazon S3 when next salary comes in! Thanks for the info, Sir Abe! I’ve been looking for a reliable backup service.
- Reply
Anton says:

14 years ago

it always pays to have backup to your backup! this is a cheap way to get peace of mind.. fast and easy setup.. too easy i thought i did something wrong!

Thanks for sharing!
- Reply
www.ez-dollar-income.ws says:

14 years ago

Thank you for sharing. I’ll check this one out right away.
- Reply
sylv3rblade says:

14 years ago

^
ok that’s it, I’m switching to S3 haha
- Reply
Jhay says:

14 years ago

I also use S3 for my blog backup for the last three months. So far, my monthly costs have been $0.60.

Much more cost effective than going for other services which you pay for storage and bandwidth in bulk but never really get to use all of it.

S3 is simply more cost-effective.
- Reply
sylv3rblade says:

14 years ago

I currently have setup an rsync backup that costs me around $10 a month. S3 looks to be a surprisingly cheap alternative.
- Reply
Andre Marcelo-Tanner says:

14 years ago

check out JungleDisk.com also for cloud backup with Rackspace, I use them for personal backup, they also have Server Backup stuff.
- Reply
Bob Reyes says:

14 years ago

Thank you very much, Abe for sharing! A more cost-effective way to backup precious website files.
- Reply

YugaGaming