The recent Orion launch has been a truly unique experience, and we’ve gotten a ton of great feedback and a lot of questions. We’ve updated the Orion FAQ, but I wanted to go into more detail on some of the most important topics.
The Cost and New Plans
Orion looks great, but I’m concerned about the cost and the possibility of it killing my profit margin.
This is the one of the most asked Orion questions. We worked hard to gain your trust and respect in the past five years, and we’re not going to let you down now. Whatever pricing model we decide to adopt, it needs to give you at the very least a similar set of tools as the ones you have right now, for a similar price.
What pricing model are you thinking of?
We ran surveys and talked to a lot of WordPress people. Our initial plan to create a per-website, per-tool pricing was not as well received as we expected. So we decided to explore a more straightforward solution – remain with the current plans, with the ability to mix and match them within a single ManageWP account. We have some other ideas floating around the office, and we’d like you to chip in with ideas of your own! Write it down in the comment section and I’d be happy to discuss it.
What about the price?
Apart from not having a pricing model, we’re also not sure about the Orion backup operating cost. It’s built to be the most reliable and robust backup solution, but we want to make sure we know the operating costs before we decide on the price. Real-time backups like VaultPress cost $15/month; we’re confident that we can provide more value for less money.
Does Orion cost extra right now, while it’s in mirror mode?
Nope. It is completely free, although you need to be on a Trial, Standard, Professional or Business plan to try it.
Development
Where is the clone/security scan/uptime monitoring/etc. tool?
All the classic ManageWP tools missing in Orion are in the making and will be implemented in the coming months. You can check out the Orion roadmap to track the progress.
What’s the timeline on further Orion development?
- October 27, 2015: Orion released in mirror mode. Has some of the classic ManageWP tools missing.
- October 2015 – February 2016: Classic ManageWP tools implemented into Orion.
- End of February 2016: Classic ManageWP gets phased out, Orion becomes the sole management dashboard.
- March 2016 and beyond: It’s up to you. And our product manager. But mostly you 🙂
I speak English, but my clients do not. Will you implement client report localization?
Yep! You guys can help us here. After the February release, we will work on a fully customizable client report, so you can do whatever you want with it. The client report is one of those things that really demonstrates your commitment and professionalism to your clients, and we want to make sure your client report conveys this perfectly.
Do you support multisite instalations?
Not for now. Multisite network architecture is a lot different than single-site installations. If you have a multisite on your classic ManageWP account, it will not be mirrored into Orion.
Do you plan on supporting multisites in the future?
100% support is unlikely because of all the architectural differences. What we’re considering is multisite support without the backup/clone tool, which is possible without sinking in a huge amount of development hours. Right now, the focus is on releasing all the tools from the Orion roadmap. Once we get there, we’ll see where your feedback takes us.
Quick update: We have decided to support multisite installations. For more information, check out this article.
Backups
What’s going to happen to the old backups? Will they be replaced by Orion backups?
The old backup system is here to stay, for two reasons: cost and flexibility. Initially, we planned to phase out the old backup, but we started talking to you about all the creative ways you’re using Dropbox, Google Drive, and other external destinations to improve your workflow. This is something that we cannot implement without significantly increasing the Orion backup operating cost, so we decided to keep them both — the old backup for low cost and flexibility, and Orion backup for reliability and peace of mind.
Can I set up the number of backups being made each day?
Yeah! Pick a site, choose View Backups, and in the Backup settings you’ll find a slider that goes from 1 to 4 backups. The final release of Orion (scheduled for the end of February) will go all the way up to real-time backups.
What are your plans for external backup destinations in Orion?
Orion backups are saved on our private Amazon S3 cloud storage. No ETA currently on the external backup destinations, for reasons mentioned in one of the earlier answers.
I have backups set on classic ManageWP, but they are not shown on Orion. Why?
Orion backups and classic ManageWP backups are completely separate for now. At some point we will carry over the classic backups to Orion to give you full flexibility over your backups.
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For a broader view, visit our Orion FAQ page. We’ll update it as new features and questions arise, so make sure to check it out from time to time.
steven
Maybe I missed it somewhere, but how long do the Orion backups on your Amazon S3 servers remain before being deleted? There does not seem to be any retention settings. The only retention settings are for uploading to an external destination.
Nemanja Aleksic
Hey Steven!
Right now they’re kept indefinitely, but once Orion goes commercial, we will probably introduce a time limit. What I can say right now is that it will be at least 90 days.
The external destination retention is determined only by the number of backups, to prevent your storage from ballooning. So if you decide to keep the last 12 backups, and send one every month, you’ll have a year’s worth of backups on your own external destination.
Brandy
I really love ManageWP (and the new Orion). Unfortunately for me, about 90% of my clients have multisite installs so it looks like I need to find another solution. 🙁
Nemanja Aleksic
What if I told you that there will be multisite support after all? 🙂
http://managewp.com/orion-multisite-support-various-new-features
Chris Edwards
I was hoping to see you guys at WordCamp US this year but did not see a booth. Not sure if your team was there or not.
The question I wanted to ask is in relation to multiple ManageWP accounts for one site. I have a client that I do Maintenance for and they use ManageWP simply for the ease of logging into client accounts. I would like to use ManageWP for all the features including custom reports for them. Is there any plans for the ability to connect two ManageWP accounts to one WordPress site?
I also see you have A LOT on your plate to launch still for Orion before February. I was a beta tester and I notice not a lot of progress seems to have been made publicly over the past few months. Is there anyway to see the status of the road map or an idea when features may be rolling out? I am currently deciding between using another system or Orion but still missing key features. I don’t mind switching over and telling my clients the reports will be lacking till February but do not want to push back too far beyond there. (Key features I am looking for is in the client reports. I want to provide SEO rank data, uptime monitoring and scheduled reports.)
Thanks for everything, the product looks great so far.
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Chris,
We skipped WCUS completely this time as we had a lot of work ahead of us, but we’ll definitely be there next year 🙂
The development is quite active, but the initial release ramped up the website count from 10,000 to almost 300,000 so we had a lot of undocumented bugs to solve. Now that we’re over the hump, the Orion roadmap items are starting to get ticked off (as soon as our devs find the time to edit it):
http://managewp.com/what-is-orion
So right now we’ve got the security check released that has a couple of brand new features. The performance check will go live in the next 10 days. Next week you’ll also get the option of linking multiple Google Analytics accounts to your ManageWP account, which is something that’s long overdue.
We’re currently on track as far as the feature set goes, and we’ll keep writing about the development progress on our blog.
Chris Edwards
Awesome. I am excited about the progress.
For the future, you should look into some sort of functionality such as WP Rollback https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-rollback/ which allows you to rollback a plugin. This is easier than restoring a backup after a plugin updates causes issues.
Nemanja Aleksic
We actually already have this functionality 🙂
If you use the Overwrite option when you install a plugin/theme, you can use the older version to install it over the newer one; e.g. the WP Rollback WordPress repo stores all the older plugin versions, just click on the Developers tab to access them.
We’re currently fine tuning the Orion restore process. Once we’re done it will be actually much better option to restore from the Orion backup. Here’s why:
Some of the plugins are know to hack the WordPress core – this is either intentional (security plugins), or just plain poor code quality.
If you roll back just the plugin, there’s no guarantee that whatever mess they made. This what happened to me a few years back with Better WP Security (it changed a lot of things on my websites that it was not able to undo on its own), so I switched to Worfence.
With the Orion backup restore, the system will look for the changed files and database tables, and restore only them. So if you’ve got a 3GB website and only 2MB worth of changes, the restore will be only 2MB heavy 🙂
Chris Edwards
Ah, very nice.
daron
Just wanted to comment that our preferred backup schedule would probably be daily, as our content/data entry is usually all done within a matter of days. If a client inputs 20 pages in one day, then the next day, they break something and we have no choice but to roll back, I would hate for them to have to recreate that content. With a daily backup, we potentially only lose a small amount of work, and we can always manually backup if we’re really worried.
Currently, we pay for 15 sites on the Professional level at $30/month per your current model. I think Orion and the much better backup system is probably worth an extra 20-30% price increase for us, as that’s essentially the only thing we use it for besides plugin/theme updates.
We are debating on moving to the Business plan as well though…something to think about 🙂
Tyler
I am pumped with Orion.
The main thing that I was very excited about was the initial pricing idea. It is perfect. We manage around 30 websites and they all have different needs. Allowing the ability of per website pricing seems perfect. I have no idea why people would not like that?? What am I missing…its how it should be.
Nemanja Aleksic
It all depends on how you built your business. Some people need the same thing across all their sites, and are afraid that the new pricing model will favor users like you at their expense.
This is why we’re not rushing with more pricing info, since we’re trying hard to find the most fair model for all of our users.
r.hertogs
Very glad that the client report can be localized! In need of a Dutch translation? Give me a call.
Nemanja Aleksic
Will do!
Sander
Is the Dutch translation already available?
Nemanja Aleksic
Not yet, as far as client reports go – the framework is almost in place, but we still need to tackle translations.
daniel
When will you be adding Sub-Account Access to the New Orion interface?
Nemanja Aleksic
Yes, the sub-user access should be immplemented until the end of February. We’re also planning on improving the sub-user access customization down the road, i.e. to let you client have full access to all features, but only for her website. It’s not definite yet, tho, and there’s plenty of other milestones to reach in the meantime 🙂
managewp
Hi, what is the current status of sub users?
Nemanja Aleksic
It’s live, but under a different name:
https://managewp.com/features/collaborate
innocent_babu
Orion is indeed a great update on a whole new level. Most reliable, peace of mind and ability to download your backups anytime on maximum available download speed. Before joining the Managewp.com i was member of Vaultpress.com. I was thinking of great about Vaultpress until i really needed them in action to restore my website into new host. My site was about 8GB in size and as per the way their system works, first they needed to examine the whole backup to make an archive which took 5 hours and then start restoring to the host which took another 3 hours. And the worst part was 3 times failure of process which wasted my almost 3 days. After experiencing such thing i decided to find another reliable solution. I google and google and read many of many articles, check different plugins and in last stop at managewp.com. And i bet managewp.com would never be better than Vaultpress if you guys didn’t introduce the Orion.
Orion helps me take the backup of my site in few minutes and enable me to download it within an hour on my maximum available download speed. Then i restored my site manually that takes next few hours because Orion is currently providing Beta version of restore so i decided not to take a chance on it. But the conclusion is you guys are awesome.
One thing that i don’t know if it is available in roadmap is better Google analytics reports in Orion. Managewp classic is currently providing more efficient and detailed analytics reports than Orion. And i will glad to see the better version of it in Orion.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for the kind words! Once we get the clone/restore fully functional, you’d be looking at a restore process of a few minutes for a 8GB website.
For now we planned for the Orion Google Analytics to be as functional as the classic. There is room to show more GA information – do you have something particular in mind?
innocent_babu
No, it would be best if we can get the same analytic reports as in classic version. Looking forward for great updates.
ellegaard
Another great update – you continue to make so hard to feel disappointed! ;o)
Donna McMaster
I really appreciate the way you’ve kept us in the loop on Orion’s trajectory, and how quickly and helpfully you always respond to my queries and concerns. You even respond to criticism with grace and humor. 🙂 I like Orion’s direction, and your communication skills make me comfortable as I patiently wait for it to mature.
Kudos!
Donna
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Donna!
We’re blessed to be working on a project that makes life easier for the WordPress community, a project we love and believe in. That’s probably why it’s easy to carry out our work with humor and grace 🙂
John
I manage quite a few wordpress sites so I am happy to give this a try.
andreas.karman
Great work with Orion!
I have a question regarding the API (http://managewp.com/docs/api/). As the moment its limited to user management, but I’m currently upgrading our company dashboard (using Dashing) and would like to retrieve data from ManageWP using the API. Is this something you have in the roadmap?
andreas.karman
For example, I would like to retrieve available updates.
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks, Andreas!
Right now the ManageWP API you linked is for the platform partners like Bluehost – more info here:
http://managewp.com/partnership
Opening our API to 3rd parties would open up a lot of new opportunities, but we have two major concerns to tackle first:
1) A full set of tools we need to complete, and
2) Security. For us, security is our number one concern, and an unsecured API is something we simply cannot allow to happen.
Charles Page
Hi Nemanja
It seems some time has passed since this response, and this is still a very required function.
Have you guys made any progress?
Thanks
Charles
Marko Tanaskovic
Hi Charles,
Quite some time have passed and quite a few changes since 2015. Long story short, API have been deprioritized as a project. Not fully shut down but moved aside for now.
We might revisit it once we finish up some bigger project but can’t promise anything.
tiffb83
I took a brief look at Orion..it looks like it basically does the same thing as ManageWP.
Currently, I’m paying around $17/month for unreliable backups, and the ability to clone sites that fail more than 50% of the time.
Your support has been very responsive, though…but still a source of much frustration when clones don’t happen and can’t be explained why they don’t work.
What is nice is a dashboard that updates the plugins all at once, and I can see all my sites at one glance.
Because your backups are unreliable, I have already purchased an alternative lifetime plugin for automatic backups that I can use on all of my websites.
I suggest you grandfather current customers in at your current pricing and do not raise the rates.
Nemanja Aleksic
Whatever we do, we’ll definitely make sure that the pricing transition is as painless as possible, and grandfathering current clients is a big part of that.
Have you tried the Orion backups? Also, we’re currently working on the Orion clone, once it goes live I’d love to hear your impression on how it compares.
kumoink
Hi Guys, just trying Orion out for the first time – very nice. I’ve been using this since it was in beta, so nice to see it progressing.
Regarding Backups. I don’t actually use ManageWP for backups currently (never have), so I have always just been on the standard plan.
We are on the 50 sites tier, so that’s around $32 per month.
I tried out backup in Orion on one site (as that is all I’m allowed to switch on as Standard user) and loved how well it works.
If I move to the Professional plan, which jumps to $75.00 for 50 sites I’m assuming I’ll then be able to then use Orion backup for all of my sites (at least while it is in beta)?
I know you don’t have firm details on pricing for Orion, but can you give any indication if the Orion pricing for backup is going to be much more than the ManageWP Professional plan is at the moment?
I really don’t want to start using this thing if the pricing is going to be way out of the box and I’m going to have to jump ship (for the backups at least) and move elsewhere.
Thanks, 🙂
Nemanja Aleksic
If you move to Professional, the Orion backup is available with no extra charge, until the classic ManageWP dashboard gets phased out at the end of February.
Can you give me an estimate how much a reliable backup is worth to you?
kumoink
That’s a hard question to answer, particularly as I do it all reasonably manually at the moment which is time consuming, but reasonably reliable. I’m not using Vaultpress or anything like this. On Vaultpress, for me $10 per site (or whatever it is they charge) is way too much for us at the moment, unless we totally rethink our pricing.
Vaultpress pricing might be ok for someone running a couple of WP sites, but not 50. It doesn’t seem to scale.
I think I’ll switch on Pro and give it a try at least until the beta runs out, and see what happens from there.
I think the initial question I’m trying to answer for myself is how long do I need backups stored for? Weeks/Months/Years – I’m really not sure. Will that alter the cost of running the backup service much?
Nemanja Aleksic
Theoretically, we could store them indefinitely, but I think the value in keeping a three year old backup is very low. Personally, three months to one year would work great for me.
Limiting how back into past your backups go would not significantly impact the cost of the backup. The main cost factor is how often the Orion backups run. If we went for the affordable solution, we’d probably aim for the weekly backup cycle.
kumoink
I would agree, around the 3 month mark would be fine.
Weekly backup cycle would work just fine for us, that is what we are doing at the moment manually.
paul.kuepfer
Hi,
Is there or will there be the opportunity to use clef as a login solution ?
Nemanja Aleksic
Hey Paul,
Clef is a very elegant solution, but currently it’s not a front runner for the new 2FA. I believe the honor currently goes to Google Authenticator.
Complete Essay
Great! I am going to check out the article its very informative thanks to share this.
seo
I am concerned about having to download my backups one at a time – very time-consuming. I feel I have to do this as I regularly seem to have to reset or re-add sites then access to backups disappears.
Nemanja Aleksic
Could you email me at nemanja.aleksic@managewp.com with more information? I’d love to hear more about your use case and how we can improve.
marcel
I’ve researched and not found anything definitive on how far back Orion will retain backups. Is there any information on the backup retention period for Orion?
marcel
Never mind, I did find the info. It seems the backups are kept indefinitely, but that is subject to change when Orion goes live. It would be nice to know what the long-term plan is shaping up to be, however.
Thanks!
Nemanja Aleksic
We’re currently analyzing the backup usage, so we could make an informed decision. Right now the idea is to keep the backups indefinitely, but we need to make sure we will be able to deliver without having to pay an arm and a leg for it 🙂
robin
I find the text too pale in colour for me – the sidebar especially is so pale it looks greyed out (I have a very good screen). When I look back at the old interface it looks immediately crisper and easier to use.
Nemanja Aleksic
Yeah, we’ve gotten a bit carried away with the design 🙂
We’re currently gathering UX feedback and will keep constantly improving the dashboard. The text/background contrast is currently on the to-do list.
mlux
Is there a way to add items to Orion’s reporting? In Manage WP you can add line-items for the PDF report. I do not see a way to do this in Orion so far. From what I can tell so far there really is not much difference between ManageWP and Orion other than the look and interface, and way better backup’s (which were needed because most of my backup’s fail on ManageWP). Why would there be a price change at all, seems like a normal upgrade of a platform.
Nemanja Aleksic
I’ve addressed the price change question in Greg’s comment, please check it out and let me know your thoughts.
As for the Orion client report, you can’t right now, although we have plans to let you fully customize the whole report, as well as schedule it. The scheduling part should be done by the time the classic ManageWP dashboard gets phased out in February, and the full customization is currently planned after February.
gmurray
I don’t get it. Seems like a new UI (maybe a little prettier, not necessarily better) and discussions of raising prices. What am I missing? Is there a compare sheet of MWP Classic vs Orion?
mlux
I would also like to see the feature comparison.
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Greg,
The price change revolves not only around the Orion backup system, but also the ability of mixing different plans, or even dropping the pricing system and adopting a new model altogether.
Let’s say you’ve got 50 websites. 20 of them are helping you keep the lights on, while the other 30 are pro bono projects, sites of your friends, or hobbies. Right now you’ve got two options:
1) Subscribe to a Professional (50 domains) plan to keep all the websites on one dashboard, or
2) Subscribe to a Professional (20 domains) and keep just the money makers on ManageWP
Now, if your business is going well, you’ll just pay the extra $30 because of convenience. But if your WordPress business is not bringing in enough money, that $30 can hurt.
What we’re working on is a fair model that will help you pay only for the tools you actually need, i.e. get a higher plan for important sites, and a lower plan (or even go free) for others.
The end goal is to have you pay less for more. That’s why we’ve been talking with you for the past year, and will keep talking until we find a solution that best suits your needs.
josh
Look forward to the changes. Especially the option to have different sites on different plans. All my client sites are on ManageWP so I can manage updates and spam. Some clients pay me extra for security and back up and currently I have backupbuddy for those clients… Would save me a lot of time if I could manage them all at once.
I like the current pricing model a lot so that I can adjust for each site depending on the client’s contract. I’d be happy to spend $1.00/site for the basics and $2.50/site for auto backup. I think the max I could do for auto backup is $5.00/site.
Realistically I think most sites only need to be backed up once a week with a 2 month archive. Daily backups are excessive and I just don’t need it… I manage 14 sites on here, with another 5-8 else where. My business partner manages another 20-30 or so. Between the two of use we average managing around 50 sites a year. None of them need daily backups… Most don’t update their website but every couple months.
Look forward to everything yall are doing! Very pleased so far.
info
how can i delete out a site from Orion?
Nemanja Aleksic
Easy – all Orion websites are mirrored from the classic ManageWP dashboard. You just need to remove the site on the classic dashboard.
brian
I look forward to seeing scheduled reporting. This would be a valuable addition to your features. Thanks for making our lives easy!
hnorfleet
Loving the new Orion interface! I did find a typo in the reporting feature:
Overview
Updates
1 plugin and theme update preformed.
I’m fairly certain the update was performed, not preformed.
Cheers!
Nemanja Aleksic
Ouch, our bad. Will get it sorted out ASAP.
Thanks for letting us know!
Phil
Like others here, I’m rather looking forward to knowing the final cost of Orion backup (admittedly I wasn’t really aware that it would cost extra when I switched some clients over from VaultPress). Maybe a tiered pricing plan like VaultPress would make sense, with real-time backup being more expensive than basic once-daily?
Apart from that, big kudos to the team: Orion looks really nice and is a pleasure to use.
Nemanja Aleksic
I totally agree: real-time backup is costly, and an overkill in cases where the content does not change on an hourly basis. The challenge is to give you all these options to choose from, without showing a pricing page that resembles a Boeing 747 cockpit.
joshua.steele
“You can check out the Orion roadmap to track the progress.”
The roadmap infographic doesn’t include Code Snippets. Will Code Snippets be present in Orion?
Nemanja Aleksic
Code Snippets will be in Orion.
The tool is so straightforward that we skipped it on the roadmap, but in hindsight it might not have been a wise decision 🙂
We will add it to the roadmap to avoid further confusion.
TONYX
Hi,
Where (location) are the Orion Backups saved?
Considering the recent invalidated US-EU Safe Harbor agreement, for European customers all data should be kept on servers in a European datacenter.
Is this the case, or will there be an option to choose the location?
Thanks,
Stefan
Henning
This is also a great concern of mine. Could you clarify if/how you are going to tackle this issue?
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Stefan,
The Orion backups are currently stored on the US cloud infrastructure. Given that the Safe Harbor agreement fell through, we’re watching the situation closely to see if Safe Harbor 2.0 will happen soon.
We want to abide by the EU law, but at the moment this is not a critical issue since you’ll still have the classic backup available, which can store your backups on a number of destinations of your choosing.
If Safe Harbor 2.0 does not happen before the classic ManageWP gets phased out, the current plan is to initially go with the US infrastructure, and introduce the EU infrastructure at a later date.
alice
We are trying the Orion beta and we can’t see the SERP/SEO tool. That’s one of the main things we use in ManageWP. Is this feature going to be added? Will it be improved from the way it is in ManageWP, where the keywords are all mooshed together and not sorted by client site?
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Alice,
The SERP/SEO tool will be in Orion, it’s listed on the roadmap. I can’t give you more details right now, as we’re still working on its interface.
Monster Creative
Hey Nemanja,
Can I just confirm then, we will be paying more for Orion Backups eventually. Just not yet? Or am I getting this wrong?
I’ve been starting to switch all my top client accounts to Orion but will hold off until I know about the cost.
Thanks.
Nemanja Aleksic
One solution would be to incorporate Orion backups into the current Business plan. Another would be to create a separate plan for the Orion backups.
Nothing is definite yet, but there’s a good chance that the Orion backups will cost extra, due to the infrastructure cost and the unlimited off-site storage that comes with it.
Hayden
Nemanja, this is a very encouraging post. The decision to change direction to meet the needs and wants of your customers shows a clear intent to satisfy the customer instead of forcing them to a new system that costs more money. I had to pick a price point for my customers that they could deal with and that is based on the tool sets that I needed to obtain to provide such a service. Obviously costs go up over time but you usually expect them to be incremental rather then exponential.
I am glad to hear that the old backup system is sticking around at least until you offer external backup options for Orion backup. I am more then thrilled with the Orion backup but it really comes down to cost. All sites really need at least some form of backup and while some clients could afford a robust expensive backup system monthly, most cannot. You mention the comparison to VaultPress and I will say the reason I choose ManageWP originally is because of cost. Backup is just one facet to providing hosting service and with nearly every software you buy having a yearly recurring fee there is plenty to consider. I do hope you find a price point that provides you guys with the profit margin you deserve (for this amazing new system) while keeping it within the realm that your average customer can swallow.
I’ve been thrilled with the responsiveness of your development staff throughout the beta to feedback and I very much look forward to the new feature sets that you have in store for Orion. I was really surprised by the UI change at the end of the beta. It was drastically better and I wasn’t expecting that. Also, I’m happy that you are keeping the existing service tiers for simplicity’s sake.
Thank you for the post.
Nemanja Aleksic
You’ve summed up our sentiment quite well, Hayden.
While the Orion backup is awesome because it works with pretty much any server setup, most sites could go by with the classic backup. The initial idea was to use the Orion backup on all websites, but this would be an overkill for a lot of websites, and it would unnecessarily drive the price up.
We are very careful about any potential price bumps. Many of our users are like you, and manage other people’s websites for a previously agreed fee. You just can’t tell your client “Hey, you’ll pay me $5 more, because economy.” (unless you’re Netflix), so we want to make sure that every price bump is optional, and that it comes with added value.
You have yourself to blame for the UI improvement 🙂 Initially we had a whole different idea for the interface, but the steady stream of beta tester feedback took us in a whole new direction. An awesome example how community involvement is a very positive thing.
hendrikb
Just want to chime in with my 2 cents: While Orion’s backup system is probably overkill for a lot of sites, it also very neatly solved my (and I’d guess some others) problem with large sites where the classic backup didn’t work due to script timeouts. With Orion that problem is just gone and it would be great if in the future a smaller backup version would use the current Orion mechanism. Just drop the backup files to an external location (dropbox, drive etc.) after it is finished (an maybe limit the backup frequency to once a week) . This reduces the storage and other AWS ressources needs on your side but would leave the smaller backup functionality with the wonderful “no timeout error backup”. Would be the best thing since sliced bread…
Nemanja Aleksic
That’s one of the ideas we’re considering. We’re analyzing the Orion backup cost to get an idea of the cost. Preliminary tests show that the S3 > Dropbox (and other external services) transfers are horrendously expensive, so we want to make sure our estimates are correct before we start implementing external destinations for the Orion backup.
hendrikb
Thanks for the feedback, I’m looking forward to see what you come up with!
ellegaard
I can agree to that. Many client sites doesn’t have the need for the continous backup, so there’s no need to add the extra cost to those accounts. But for others, it’s the only way to solve the problems in backup. So a mix would be preferrable.