I finally got around to installing a backup plugin. After looking at a few possibilities, I settled on UpdraftPlus for now. The free version does scheduled backups, with e-mail notification, of both the database and the file system. For now, I’m just backing up to the local file system on my web host, but at some point I’ll try sending them to Google Drive or DropBox, both of which are possible with this plugin.
It looks like the free version will do everything I need it to, but if I want to switch over to the premium version, it’s $60, with one year of support and updates. Subsequent years are discounted a bit. Oh, and I should really try doing a restore, from my production site to my test site, just to make sure those backup files really work. (I have enough IT experience to know that I can’t assume that those files aren’t just filled with zeroes…)
One another front, I recently turned on the site monitoring feature in Jetpack. Based on the reports I’ve gotten over the last couple of days, my site apparently goes down more than I realized. I’ll have to keep an eye on it for a while, and see if this is an anomaly, or if 1&1 is just not as reliable as I thought. Or it may just be that my home page sometimes takes more than ten seconds to load, which is a separate problem. (Though I’d think the Jetpack monitor should be getting the static cached version of the page, which should load pretty quickly.)
And speaking of slow load times, the WordPress admin on my site is still working pretty slowly most of the time. I know I can’t fix that with caching, and I’m not sure what I can really do about it. I guess I can deactivate some plugins and see if there’s a particular plugin causing the slowdown. Using SSL might be contributing to the problem, but I don’t want to turn that off. So I guess I’ll do some research and some experimenting over the next few days. Fun!
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