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 $0.15PHP 9INR 13EUR 0.14CNY 1 per GB of storage and another $0.15PHP 9INR 13EUR 0.14CNY 1 per GB of bandwidth transfers. They also charge per server requests but that’s like $0.01PHP 0.59INR 0.85EUR 0.01CNY 0.07 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 $4.51PHP 265INR 382EUR 4CNY 33 for the month. Not bad, huh?