The more we’ve developed UpdraftPlus, the more we’ve become convinced of something: not all web hosts are equal – far from it – and good web hosting matters.
UpdraftPlus has been developed to try and squeeze the maximum out of every web hosting setup; it has ‘resume’ and multiple-path strategies to try to cope with every setup it finds itself in. Our aim is for everyone says “Why are you using <product X> for your backups? Just use UpdraftPlus – it works!”. Where WordPress works, we want UpdraftPlus to work.
But, there’s “works” and there’s “works”. It’s one thing to squeeze the last drops out of a dry lemon. It’s another to have a smooth, fast ride from start to finish. Some cheap hosts are overloading their servers; and the increasing number of websites upon them are competing for a diminishing amount of resources. UpdraftPlus has the “Fix Time” add-on to enable scheduling your backups in the “small hours” when servers are lightly loaded and have spare capacity. But, if your server is overloaded during the day, then your visitors will notice it, regardless of how smoothly your backups run overnight – and they will go elsewhere. You can then spend hours on trimming your website’s resource usage – not a bad thing to do -and then do it again a few months later when the web host has loaded even more onto the server. Or you could just switch to a web host that gives more resources.
