How to backup your WordPress site to Amazon S3 using BackWPup backup plugin (Part 3 of 5)

Setting up a backup process for your blog or website is one of the most important things that many people ignore. It is like insurance — by the time you need it, its too late. We don’t setup a backup process either because we don’t realize its importance (until it is too late). Or because we are too lazy. Or it looks too daunting. Or we just don’t know how.

Sometimes people setup a backup process, but keep the backup files on the same server that runs their website. Sure, this is better than not setting up any backup process at all, but this leaves them expose to the eventuality of losing their backups if the system running the website crashes. To be really safe, backup files should be stored somewhere other than the server running your website. That is, you should store your backups “offsite”.

Now, storing your backups “offsite” simply means storing your backups in some place other than the machine that is running your website. This means you have the following options:

1. Email: This is the easiest to understand. You can have the backup program email the backup files to youself, but some email services do not allow large files to be attached to emails (and backup files can get large).
2. Download it manually: You can manually download the backup file. But this means you have to remember to do this on a regular basis. This is not the best use of your time.
3. FTP: Some backup programs also allow you to FTP the backup files to another machine. But this requires to have another hosting service that you can FTP the files to — most people don’t have another hosting service.

So, what is the best option for “offsite” backup storage?

Enter Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a web-based cloud-storage service. Basically, it means that you can store any data (such as you backup files) “in the cloud” on Amazon.com’s servers and take advantage of Amazon’s scale and reliability. Amazon S3 is <quote>designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year <end-quote>. Although recent events demonstrated that even Amazon can have a bad day, using Amazon S3 for storing your backups is still a good solution.

And the best part is, for most people, it won’t cost them anything.

At the time of this writing, Amazon offers a “Free Usage Tier” which should allow most small websites to use Amazon S3 for backups for free.

The best part of using Amazon S3 is that, for most people, it won’t cost anything. Signing up for an Amazon S3 account is free. you only pay when you use the service — and that too ONLY if your usage goes above the Free Usage Tier.

At the time of this writing, Amazon offers a “Free Usage Tier”, which gives you free storage of up to 5GB of storage per month.

A zipped up backup file for a typical small business wordpress website will be under 1 GB (most likely it will be less than 500MB) — so you are covered by the 5GB size.

The “Request Pricing” chart relates to the number of times you will perform backups. Every time you perform a backup, the backup file gets uploaded to Amazon S3. This results in one “PUT” request to Amazon. If you download your backup file from Amazon S3 (say to your local machine), this results in one “GET” request.
Amazon’s Free Tier allows 1,000 PUT requests (thats the number of times you can create backup files and upload to Amazon) in a month. And it allows 20,000 GET requests (that’s the number of times you can download your backup files in a month)! That’s more than enough for the purpose of backing up your website.

There is one more consideration: The size of the backup file that you will be uploading to Amazon S3 every time you backup over the period of a month.
Amazon’s Free Tier allow a total of 15 GB data to be uploaded to Amazon S3 in a month.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this.

Let’s say the size of your backup file is 1 GB. and let’s say you have setup your backup program to run once a week. Let’s also assume that there are 5 weeks in a month (there are about 4.5 — but lets be on the safe side).
This means that in a month you will upload 5GB (1 GB x 5) worth of data to Amazon every month. This is well under 15 GB.

Most small websites should be able to use Amazon S3 for storing their backups once a week for FREE !

This article will walk you through each step of signing up for an Amazon S3 account. The provided screenshots should, hopefully, take all the guesswork out of the signup process. And remeber, it costs nothing to signup — you get charged only when you start using the service, and that too only if you exceed the usage provided in the Free Usage Tier. So go ahead and sign up NOW 🙂

Go to http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
Click on the ‘Sign Up Now’ button and enter your desired login username and password

Enter your Contact Information

Now Amazon verifies that you say who you are.
In order to verify your identity, Amazon will call the phone number you provided.

As soon as you click the “Call Me Now” button, a 4 digit PIN will be displayed on the screen.
And your phone will ring.
Answer the phone when it rings.
An automated message will ask you to enter the PIN that is displayed on the screen.
Enter the 4 digit PIN in your phone

As soon as you enter the PIN on the phone, the screen will change to show you the ‘continue’ button.

Your Identity Verification is complete.

Click the ‘continue’ button.

Once you click the ‘continue’ button, you will see the above page.

Check your email account. You should see two emails from Amazon Web Services.

The email with the subject “AWS Unified Registration Sign-Up Confirmation” indicates that your account has been activated.

Congratulations! You have successfully creating an Amazon S3 account!

Now you are ready to configure BackWPup to store your backups on Amazon S3. This will be covered in the next article: How to backup your WordPress site to Amazon S3 using BackWPup backup plugin (Part 4 of 5)