In April I wrote about a new service by Hostgator I had registered for, Site Auto Backup (SAB).

At the time, I was too new to the service to offer much of a review but, with my first month done and my second payment having been made, I definitely have a perspective on the service as well as its strengths and weaknesses.

The news, unfortunately, is not very good. Though there are a lot of things that SAB does fairly well, what I encountered was not a dependable, reliable backup service but an error-plagued service that has failed to give the peace of mind it was supposed to give.

However, there is still hope for the service, so long as it can find its rhythm and fix its problems.

My Setup

For the past year or so I have consolidated all of my hosting needs so a single VPS on Servint. The VPS is primarily for my sites and my wife’s, but we also host a few friends of ours who have smaller blogs. All in all, the VPS is home to a little over a dozen domains, about half of which are active enough to warrant daily backups. The other half are either static sites, under (re)construction or are inactive and don’t need regular backups at this time.

I registered for SAB for a 5 GB/$4.95 per month account thinking it would be enough to host at least a few backups for all of my sites. Though I wasn’t sure of the exact amount of space I would need, I knew I could adjust the number of backups on a domain-by-domain basis to fit within the space limitations and 5 GB should be enough for at least one, probably many more. I then configured SAB to work with my CPanel/WHM configuration using my root account so to pick up all the domains, thinking it would be the easiest solution.

Unfortunately, the problems started almost right away. I manually requested the first backup and, though most of the domains completed, some of the larger ones did not. It took several retries before one domain, my largest in terms of traffic an file size, completed. Whether it was the stress of all the backup requests pounding on my VPS or something else I can’t be certain, but it was an ominous warning.

Still, I did manage to get a decent backup of every domain set up and I then stopped the ones that didn’t need further backups. I looked at the numbers and calculated that I had at least enough for three backups of each domain, a reasonable number that offered decent protection from bad backups and delayed responses to problems.

With that done, I kicked back and happily waited for the care-free and hands-off backup experience the site had promised I would enjoy. Sadly, it wasn’t mean to be.

The Good

But before I jump into the problems that I faced, I do want to talk briefly about what did go right with SAB.

To be clear, most of the domains on my site have had no trouble backing up correctly. The small ones, which have just a basic WordPress install and very few media files, have had no issues whatsoever. In fact, I’ve been very surprised at how well SAB worked on those domains.

Even better, I can say with confidence that, for an average blogger, the 1 GB account, which costs $1.95 per month is more than adequate. My personal blog, for example, takes up only 25 MB of space per backup. This means that I could easily backup several month’s worth of the site for the base price without running out of room.

Also, the service did, with only a minor hiccup, detect when I added new accounts to my WHM, making it fairly seamless and saving me a lot of the legwork.

In short, SAB, for 90% of the backups, did exactly what it was supposed to do and did it consistently. Unfortunately though, for a backup system to bring peace of mind, that number needs to be a lot closer to 100%.

The Bad

The big issue with SAB can be summarized in one word: Bugs.

In the month that I’ve been with the service I’ve filed no fewer than four support requests on a total of five different issues. That’s more than I’ve filed with my main host in over a year.

Here’s a short rundown of the problems I’ve had to date:

1. Space Used Not Updating: When I first set up the account, the space being used as not updating so I had to go through each account by hand and add up how much of my quota I had used. This was fixed after a support request.



2. Old Backups Not Deleting: I set up all the domains to have three backups but, for a brief period, some of the domains had four or more. This caused me to go over my quota. It seemed to be caused by a conflict with manual runs not being properly cycled off. This issue seems to have been fixed though I haven’t done many manual backups to check.
3. False Disk Full Errors: My largest site has a backup file of about 900 MB. However, SAB would constantly throw back disk full errors even though the account had well over a 1.5 GB of space left. This problem, is unresolved despite support requests. I’ve reduced the number of backups for this domain and worked to remove unneeded files form the server, but it constantly times out as a disk full error unless I manually delete a backup and then run the process by hand.
4. Emails From Other Accounts: This one was very frightening as I woke up one morning to nearly 40 email messages for backups that were not in my account. The subject line listed the CPanel names of other users though the text in the mail was for one of my domains. There wasn’t much useful information in these emails so there was no security threat, but it worried me to see this information about other users in my inbox and made wonder about if my data was safe. This issue was resolved after a support request.
5. New Account Added Multiple Times: Finally, one of the domains I added in the past month appeared as planned in SAB but did so three times. I deleted the repeated accounts only to have them readded the next morning. A support request fixed this issue and now the domain is backing up correctly, which is good news for me because it is my wife’s new site.

In short, my largest and most important site is not backing up consistently and the entire experience has been fraught with bugs and hiccups. Though some of this should be expected with such a new service, it has been a terrible pain and anything but the reassurance it was supposed to be.

Bottom Line

To be completely fair, SAB’s support team has been very good through all of this. Though I wish I had not needed them so much during this past month, they were always prompt, courteous and professional, even giving me an extra GB in my account for free to try and straighten out the false disk full errors, sadly it didn’t help.

In the end, the feeling I get is that SAB is a fine service if you’re a smaller blogger with just one or two sites. The trouble I’ve had with the blogs that take up less than 100MB of backup space has been minimal but my larger sites, including a shopping cart and a media-intense blog, have been major headaches. Fortunately, only one of those two requires daily backups now.

So, despite all the problems, I have to stop short out outright recommending everyone avoid it. Not only are these bugs that can be straightened out but it has worked well on certain types of sites. However, use caution if you do plan on using it with your CPanel/WHM account and don’t assume it will be the smooth experience you want, at least not initially.

Webmasters with larger backup needs, however, are probably better off finding a different backup solution, at least until SAB gets all the wrinkles ironed out.

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Tags:   backups • cPanel • cpanel whm • hostgator • site auto backup