DropMySite Changes Pricing – What Now For Backup?

For a long time, I recommended DropMySite for offsite website backups that didn’t impact your site. I even wrote about using DropMySite with NameHero and why it was so good. Compared to other backup solutions, DropMySite was far cheaper and more efficient. It gave you a fixed amount of storage and backup for unlimited sites for just $30 per year!

The Old DropMySite Pricing Has Gone

Here’s a screenshot of what the old DropMySite pricing used to be:

Compared to other solutions like CodeGuard and Jetpack Backup, DropMySite was absurdly cheap. For less than $3 per month, you could back up as many sites as you wanted with 10 GB of storage space! I always thought it was too good to be true.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised with a commentor on my site WP-Tweaks.com pointed out that this pricing is no longer available. Sure enough, when I visited their website, I saw that the new plans look like this:

So the basic new plan is more than six times as expensive as the old one – granted, with a lot more storage space.

Fortunately, I’m grandfathered in with the old plan, so I can continue renewing my subscription for the low price of $30/year. But new users will need to find something else.

Amazingly, for Multiple Sites, DropMySite Still Wins

The crazy thing is that even with this price increase, DropMySite still beats both CodeGuard and Jetpack Backup in pricing if you have multiple websites that you need to backup. Both of the other two solutions charge you on a “per website” basis and DropMySite beats out both of them easily if you have two or three sites. But if you have just a single site, there are better solutions than DropMySite.

NameHero Backups Cover Unlimited Sites

By default, NameHero takes a nightly and weekly backup of your website and also allows you to take snapshots of your server and restore them with one click. You get this functionality with all their plans, which is something no other web host has.

However, you can also purchase additional offsite storage to keep up to 30 days of backups, so you can easily restore your site to any point during that time. Here’s a screenshot of the pricing that you get with NameHero:

As you can see, NameHero doesn’t have a restriction on the number of websites you choose to backup. Of course, the larger your site, the more space you require. But 5GB should be enough for 30 days backup of a single site.

Unfortunately, these backups aren’t incremental. So you’re essentially storing a full backup on your server, which utilizes a lot more space than if only the changes were stored. NameHero also stores your backups off-site, so in case something goes wrong with your server itself, you’ll still have access to your backups.

Characteristics of the Perfect Backup Solution

Here’s what I consider to be the perfect backup solution.

First, the backups should be over SSH/SFTP/FTP. No server work should be involved. No zipping files and folders. This creates a big strain on the server, and on my shared hosting solutions, it can bring your entire site to a crawl.

Second, you pay for storage space, instead of on a “per site” basis. Unlike CodeGuard and Jetpack Backup, the ideal server backup solution transfers your files and databases for as many sites as you want. The only thing you pay for is storage space.

Third, backups must be stored offsite. By default, plugins like UpdraftPlus and others will save a copy of the backup on your server. This is a bit dangerous since if something happens to our server, we don’t want the collapse to take our backups with it.

Fourth, we should be able to restore the backups on another server if necessary. This is the biggest disadvantage with host-based backups because, by definition, they can only be used on the specific host in question.

So far, DropMySite was the only solution that met all these criteria. Even with the massive price increase, it’s still better than the other solutions when you have multiple sites. But for those of us with just a single site, we need to look for alternative solutions. NameHero’s in-built backups are a good cost-effective alternative.