Imagine that you recently bought your first Lamborghini. Now imagine the level of excitement while driving it for the very first time on the road. It must be the feeling of success and thoughts of dreams coming true!

Except if you live in a town with roads like this.

So, what do Lamborghinis, roads and backups have in common? It’s very simple – Lamborghini is your business, backups are your Casco insurance and no matter what happens, your business is safe, and the road –  that’s everything else your business and your dreams depend on.

PHP backups are usually perceived as grumpy solutions which eat your server resources. So, how to deal with it and ensure your business and your dreams are safe?

Typical Reasons for WordPress Backups to Fail

A Suboptimum Server Setup

Poor website server performance is the number one enemy of your backup system. Too many websites on a single server use the same shared resources. Therefore, it is not possible to run a backup on all websites simultaneously, and resources that you have for your website hit the peak very fast.

Outdated PHP version uses more resources and can prevent the backup solution to use improved functions.

Server Security

Some hosting providers decide to block PHP backup solutions and offer only their service in this matter. Basically, the access to some important parts of your site is locked. Due to security reasons, access to some shell functions on shared servers are disabled. In this case, the backup solutions are forced to use an inferior PHP function fallback, which consumes many more resources. Server Timeouts prevent longer scripts to run and cut the connection after some amount of time.

Server Timeouts and Server Performance can become a nightmare for your business. And by all the statistics these are the number one issues of failed backups.

Huge Database Tables

Huge tables with expired transient data can really affect your website performance. And the performance of the backup process as well. A couple of days ago I’ve seen a database table larger than 2 GB.

It usually means that you either need to clean your table or you will hit some server limit and won’t be able to backup your site.

Large Websites

The more files you have, the more time it is needed to finish the process. That is why having too many old files (or large files) in the wp-content folder leads to the same situation – the server timeout cuts the backup process before it comes to an end.

Customized WordPress Websites

Sometimes users use the customized structure for their sites. Certain backup solutions struggle to detect it efficiently and to pull all your data.

How We Addressed These Issues At ManageWP

When we started building Orion, the goal was to make everything as independent as possible of other (external) factors. The analogy was pretty much clear and simple – ManageWP Orion backups offer you the same experience like driving your Lamborghini, no matter what the road looks like.

No more backups are saved on your server. ManageWP Orion creates an incremental backup, meaning that after the initial backup, only the changes you make on your website are tracked and uploaded to our cloud storage.

The majority of the work is done by our own server infrastructure, so your website’s server load is brought to a minimum.

In case your hosting provider is blocking our requests, we simply decrease the number of parallel requests sent from our side, so the backup process can finish.

If you have many websites on the same server, and all your backups are scheduled at the same time, Orion will help you in rescheduling that during the off-peak, when there is a minimum number of visits in the day, and your server performance won’t be affected.

ManageWP Orion Database Optimization can help you in cleaning your WordPress table overhead. It will clean your WordPress core tables. In the future, we plan to detect other transient data as well and to propose you cleaning them.

Changing the infrastructure and the backup logic brought us to the current success rate of 97% (comparing to 80% in ManageWP Classic). The goal is to bring the success rate to 99.5% in the following months.

99.5% is an open road with no speed cameras, just you and your Lamborghini.