Post Status Happiness Hour Session Twelve

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews David Johnson, product owner at Solid WP, to discuss the launch of Backups Next Gen a rebranded version of Backup Buddy. David shares his background and the evolution of WordPress backup solutions, emphasizing the need for modern, cloud-based infrastructure to enhance performance and security. They delve into the features of Backups Next Gen including its user-friendly interface and incremental backup capabilities. The episode also highlights the importance of reliable backups and the supportive WordPress community. Michelle concludes by encouraging listeners to explore Solid WP’s offerings.

Top Takeaways:

Backup Solutions and Features: David Johnson gives an in-depth overview of Backups Next Gen, highlighting its ability to perform incremental backups by only saving changed files daily, while backing up the entire database. Users can restore backups with a single click, and they can generate downloadable zip archives for specific moments in time. This makes it easier to choose the right backup and manage storage effectively.
Integrated Cloud Storage in Pricing: Backups Next Gen now includes cloud storage in its pricing. Previously, storage was sold separately, but the new pricing structure offers more storage per site as users increase their licenses. This simplified pricing model is designed to offer generous and cost-effective cloud storage.
Solid Suite and Black Friday Deals: SolidWP is offering a Black Friday sale for both Backups Next Gen and the Solid Suite, a bundle that includes Solid Security Pro, Solid Central, and the Solid Academy. The Solid Suite offers significant value for WordPress users by bundling multiple tools to enhance security, backups, and site performance.
Solid Academy: The Solid Academy, run by Nathan Ingram, offers extensive training resources with live streams and a decade’s worth of courses on topics such as AI email, WordPress plugins, and how to run a successful freelance or agency business. It’s designed for developers and agencies looking to grow and increase their revenue.

Mentioned In The Show:

🙏 Sponsor: WordPress.com

Build and manage professional sites with secure managed hosting on WordPress.com. Beautiful themes, built-in SEO, and payment tools, and access to over 50,000 plugins. Everything you need for your business, plus 24/7 support from WordPress experts.

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

David G. Johnson (Product Owner, SolidWP)
Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

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Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02 Welcome to Post Status Happiness Hour. My guest today is David Jensen. David, how are you?

David Johnson 00:00:07 I’m great. Michelle, how are you?

Michelle Frechette 00:00:10 I am doing well. Thank you. It’s nice to have you on here. I do get to work with you at the same place during the day, which is nice. And now we’re crossing over into my other role. So it was nice to kind of to be able to invite you on the show and talk about what’s going on right now, because we just launched a new feature, feature? product? What are we calling it?

David Johnson 00:00:29 That’s a whole new product. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:31 It’s a whole new product. Okay, I know I wrote the, the I know, I, I know I wrote the press release, but that was two weeks ago, I can’t remember.

David Johnson 00:00:38 You’ve slept. Absolutely. You’ve slept since then, Michelle. It’s all good. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:41 I mean, life’s been happening. Life’s been happening. But.

David Johnson 00:00:44 Oh my gosh. Yeah, life has been happening. That’s true.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:46 Sure has. There’s been hurricanes. There’s been deaths. There’s been all kinds of stuff going on. There’s I’ve heard there’s a little bit of turmoil in WordPress. I mean, there’s been a lot of stuff happening.

David Johnson 00:00:56 I was about to say I yeah, I, I haven’t at least there’s nothing major going on in the world like a US election either to you, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:01:04 Yeah, but that’s only like a week and a half away now. Two weeks from yesterday, I think. Something like that. Right. Anyway. Yeah. So. But yeah. So what are we talking about? We’re talking about next gen backups with Solid WP. So give us a little bit of an overview. Well first of all tell everybody who you are, where you are, what you do. I shouldn’t forget that part because I know you.

David Johnson 00:01:24 I know right? Right. This is so fun too, because I’ve, I don’t know how many shows you run or have run that I’ve been on, but I actually brought a coffee mug today.

David Johnson 00:01:32 Just I was choosing my coffee mug earlier, thinking, oh, I’m going to be on with Michelle. I have to make sure that I have a good coffee mug.

Michelle Frechette 00:01:38 Other podcast, but still show us. Show us your choice.

David Johnson 00:01:41 Oh, yeah. Oh, it’s the Solid WP, coffee mug, and I. I set it on a thing to heat the coffee, and that’s that’s why it’s got, like, a burn mark. Yeah. but, yeah, I am, I am called Product Owner. That is my title, which is hilarious because I don’t own anything. with respect to the product, but, but it’s a, it’s a title from software development. Of course, that’ll be familiar to the Post Status, audience and crowd. I’m sure you.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:06 Own you own the success or failure thereof. Yeah.

David Johnson 00:02:09 I have all the responsibility and none of the authority. How’s that? Like no one reports to me whatsoever. but I am responsible for what we build. And so. Yeah, Solid WP is great.

David Johnson 00:02:19 Of course, if you’re not familiar with Solid WP, that is the brand that was known as iThemes for many, many, many years. And in fact, has a tremendous legacy in the world of backups because iThems produced Backup Buddy, back in the day, which was, of course, for many years the sort of premier backup solution, for WordPress. So I’m excited to, to be on the team. But I came from, I came from a different background entirely. I’m a marketer, by nature, and ran a marketing business for many years, did a lot of consulting, and in about 2006 discovered WordPress and have been using it ever since. Joined the community in about 2007, so I’ve been around for a little while and involved in involved in various ways. I’ve spoken for WordCamps and I am technically the co-organizer of our local WordPress Meetup. But we’ve had a little struggle getting back up and running since the pandemic. Honestly. but I’m here in Florida. Yeah. And so yeah, I’m in Sarasota, Florida.

David Johnson 00:03:19 We just got hit with Milton. was that two weeks ago now? I guess it was two weeks ago today, if I’m remembering correctly. Yeah, so. But it direct hit, thankfully, not too much damage right here where I am. My internet connection dropped out for a few days, which was painful. It’s very difficult to work. But I don’t know what else to tell you.

Michelle Frechette 00:03:41 I mean work, I’d be like, I can’t get TikTok. What am I going to do with myself? Book. Read a book?

David Johnson 00:03:47 I can’t keep track of the drama on X related to WP. What? Like what? So, but, yeah, we’re we’re, we’re trucking along and really, really excited. I’ve been a part of this Solid team for a little over. Well, actually, it’ll be a year in November that I’ve been involved with the Solid WP team. So really excited about it. Yeah. Really fun.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:07 Well, I’m glad you weathered the storm, and I’m glad you’re still hanging out with us over at Stellar WP.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:11 And so tell. So tell us a little bit about what’s going on. I mean we rebranded last year so we were iThemes, now we’re Solid WP. But yeah, this whole next gen backups, give us a little bit of an overview. feel free to share your screen if you want to. It’s all up to you. Like to do. Yeah.

David Johnson 00:04:26 Yeah. So, yeah, I might jump in and and and show the product a little bit, actually, if you’d like.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:32 Sure. Absolutely.

David Johnson 00:04:33 Yeah. But I think, I think it’s worth talking a little bit about like, you know, what it is that caused us to arrive at, at building a new backup solution. And, you know, we talked about Backup Buddy, which was part of the rebrand. It got rebranded Solid Backups, and, has been going strong for a very, very long time. And in fact, it’s been going on strong for so long that earlier this year, Back in January, February, we were taking a hard look at Solid Backups and there were features that we needed to add and there were things that needed to change.

David Johnson 00:05:03 And the one thing that happens when you have a product that’s been around for 15 plus years is that code ages. And there was a lot of old code sitting around and things, and it became one of those situations where it’s like, hey, if you want to move that one thing right there, all you have to do is rebuild the entire plugin, you know?

Michelle Frechette: Is that all?

David Johnson: Yeah. It was it was one of those situations where it was like, wow, you know, and and of course it had been things had been bolted on over time. And but we were sort of looking at it with this, the viewpoint that was like, given the fact that there is so much, tech debt and legacy code and things and that there there are risks, you know, we could break sites if we if we make a change and code doesn’t work exactly the way that, you know, it’s expected to And, all of that. It gave us a moment where we just said, look, hey, given that, like, a rebuild is potentially what we’re looking at, what would it be like if we just reimagined backups from the ground up in 2024? Like, what’s different about WordPress and about the way that we run WordPress sites? I mean, in 2009, when Backup Buddy was created, WordPress was a blogging tool still, right? You know, we weren’t really building sites with it the same way that we do now.

David Johnson 00:06:24 Custom post types didn’t exist yet. You know all the things that make WordPress this amazing tool. Now, we’re still in their infancy back then, and you really didn’t even have backups. If you thought about it, like back then, your host may have backed things up, but they didn’t.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:39 And if they did, they charge you for it too. If they did, yeah.

David Johnson 00:06:43 And so you only had one choice you one if you wanted to run backups, you needed a plugin. And so, you would run PHP code that ran on your server. It occupied Ram and CPU resources and storage space and all that sort of stuff, and your backup would sit there in your file system, along with WordPress and whatever else. And so that was the way it was done. Today, the world has changed. I mean, if you think about, like even just a few years ago, the Google Experience update, remember that. Remember when Michelle, we all learned what core web vitals were? Like the world that we live in today.

David Johnson 00:07:22 And WordPress is so different and our websites have to perform. And the idea that you would run code in and occupy the resources, the PHP and the Ram and the and the storage resources on your server that your, your depending on to serve lightning fast page load times to your site’s visitors. Like why would you bog your site down with that today? And so like in today’s world, it’s like, no, you wouldn’t create a backup solution that would run in a plugin. You would do it differently. And of course the other way. So there’s two ways today that we do backups. One is in the plugin and the other one is hosts. We mentioned that now today we have managed WordPress offerings or I should say managed hosting for sites built with WordPress. And those those offerings today, do offer backups. But when you think about it, a lot of times those are a little cumbersome. and they do a good job, they backup your site you can restore. But like when you’re thinking about like, hey, which which which of these backups do I want to restore? Or what happened to my site between day one and day ten or whatever, that might make that the backup I want to restore instead of another.

Michelle Frechette: Right.

David Johnson 00:08:30 So there’s like a lot of different considerations. So we said, what if we could just imagine a solution that used Solid WP is cloud infrastructure. We are owned by a hosting company for, you know, like with data centers, with servers and horsepower and resources.

Michelle Frechette: Go figure!

David Joshnson: What if we could just use all of that to power backups instead of running in a plug in on someone site. And so that’s kind of what we did.

Michelle Frechette: That’s pretty cool.

David Johnson: And yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. And it’s also been really exciting because as, as I mentioned, like I’ve only been on the team since, you know, November of last year. So I was still very new to the team. And it’s been really exciting to work with some really brilliant people. These are the people that bring you Solid Security. So we put these engineering minds on what does it take to to architect a new backup solution in 2024? And they’re thinking about it from a security standpoint, from a performance standpoint, like how do we keep your site up and running and powered well and still give you reliable backups and give you a great experience when it comes time to restore? And so I think what we’ve arrived at is something that sort of factors all of that in.

David Johnson 00:09:33 And although it is not what it will become, we’ve launched something that’s pretty freaking cool, if I may say so myself. And I am not an engineer, so I can’t take credit for it.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:45 But you will. But you will say so yourself anyway.

David Johnson 00:09:47 I will say so myself because I work with an amazing team. Yeah. And they’ve they’ve done an amazing job. So. So yeah. Does it make sense Michelle I mean, the other things you want to talk about or do you want me to dive in and show?

Michelle Frechette 00:09:58 Well, I should dive in and pull it up on the on and I’ll add it to the to the screen. But little known fact I will share with you the very first plugin I ever purchased. Once I started using WordPress was Backup Buddy.

David Johnson 00:10:11 Really? Oh wow, that is cool.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:14 And the reason was because I was building on my own hosting before I would put it on a on a customer’s hosting, and I had to have a way to migrate it, and Backup Buddy was the way to do it.

David Johnson 00:10:26 Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that’s that tool that we called Import Buddy is still in Solid Backups. It’s still there. It’s really fantastic migration tool to this day. It is. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I is. Very cool.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:38 That’s what I used. That’s what I still have.

David Johnson 00:10:38 I’m excited to hear that I was trying to think like what was the first paid plugin that I used? I don’t know, I remember buying the first paid themes that I bought were Woothemes.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:51 Mine were, Elegant Themes.

David Johnson 00:10:53 Elegant Themes. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I was in Elegant Themes.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:55 I bought a life a lifetime membership way back in the mid. Well, probably 2014, 2013, something like that.

David Johnson 00:11:05 Cool. I don’t remember when I started using Divi, but it was, it was I did get I didn’t buy I never bought the lifetime deal. I kept thinking, like, I want these people to still be in business. So I want to use the I want to pay every year.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:19 I was bootstrapping at the time, so I was so happy to see that.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:22 And it was probably during Black Friday, and I probably got it for, like, dirt cheap.

David Johnson: Yeah, yeah.

Michelle Frechette: And it more than paid for itself over the years. Now I’m a Kadence user. So.

David Johnson: Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette: All my building now. But man those Divi got me through a lot of the lean years. Let’s just say that.

David Johnson 00:11:38 I get that no, 100%. I was thankfully charging clients and so I was I felt like I was in a situation where I should pay annually.

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, for sure.

David Johnson: But yeah. And we have some of those folks who bought, Backup Buddy back in the day, paid for a lifetime deal and have unlimited sites to this day. So that’s, that’s been, that’s been an adventure too, Yeah. So, hey, after you, after you buy Solid Backups Next Gen, you’re going to see a screen that looks just like this. And I want to show this to you because it all happens in your browser. And so we click let’s get started.

David Johnson 00:12:11 And I am going to connect a playground site. And you will probably laugh at the URL.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:21 I can almost see it. The beard.

David Johnson 00:12:24 It’s the beard dot item dot ES. So it’s one of those, you know, vanity URLs. This was the team thought it would be funny to make me a playground site calling it the beard.

Michelle Frechette: The beard.

David Johsnon: Yeah. So once you put in your URL, we’re going to ask your WordPress site for permission. And so this means you have to be signed in to your WordPress site already. Or it of course it will prompt you if you’re not, but we’re going to give permission here inside of WordPress, so I’m going to approve this. This is using something called Application Passwords, which has been in WordPress for several years now, actually. But you don’t see it a lot. A lot of people aren’t using it. So it’s kind of an interesting, interesting tidbit, but that allows us to connect to WordPress. And then once we connect it to WordPress, then we need to enroll your site in the actual Backups Next Gen system.

David Johnson 00:13:19 So what’s happened in the background, which you couldn’t see happening, is that the system has installed two plugins. So we like to say that that Backups Next Gen is not a plugin because it’s not it doesn’t use the plugin to power anything other than, we do have a plugin for, displaying the current status of, of Backups Next Gen. So is your site connected or not? And if it’s not, then we offer you a chance to connect. Or if you’ve not purchased it, you can buy it. But also there’s something called Solid Central. And Solid Central is both a plug in and it’s where I am sitting right now. I’m sitting in Solid Central and this is like a management tool, but this is actually where all of the user experience for Backups Next Gen lives. It’s right here in this environment. So I’m going to click enroll. And this is where something happens that’s a little trickier. First let me let me choose an option. Here. We get to decide how long we’re going to retain backups for this site.

David Johnson 00:14:16 And so I’m going to say a year we’ll keep backups for a year. Why not. And then I’ll click save and continue. Now this is the part that’s kind of different from maybe a traditional backup solution. So you remember when you installed Backup Buddy and you got it going, right? Everything happened on your server, so you didn’t need to do any connecting or anything fancy unless you wanted to move your files offsite.

Michelle Frechette: Right.

David Johnson: And maybe to a cloud environment. Maybe it was Dropbox or Google Drive or Stash was the tool that it was built and offered. Which would which would provide cloud storage. In this case, we’re already running. This is what you’re seeing here. This user experience is all on Central from Solid WP. This is our cloud system already. So what we have to do is actually create a server to server connection that talks, allows the cloud WP servers or the Soild WP cloud service to talk to your hosting server. So we ask you which host you’re on. And we do this for two reasons.

David Johnson 00:15:16 One of which I’ll explain now, and that is that we need to show you, relevant help docs. So.

Michelle Frechete: That makes sense.

David Joshnson: Yeah, if you’ve never used SSH before, then this is where you’re going to be, involved in setting up an SSH connection. And so and so we actually link out, we have special URLs here that will update based on which host you chose. But in this case, I’ve already done this earlier today and had a hilarious live demo of breakage of everything you can imagine. So I have the values sitting here already handy.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:55 I was going to say otherwise. You’ve like a murphy’s, Murphy’s Law kind of thing going on otherwise, right?

David Johnson 00:16:01 Oh, it was like, I felt like Bill gates in 1995 when Windows blue screened on him in front of the entire world, I was like, are you kidding me? Like everything, it was absolutely Murphy’s Law. Everything that could go wrong did, go wrong. But in any case, we need to know the server address.

David Johnson 00:16:16 A lot of times this is just your your domain. But I’m using a Nexcess server, and I found that if I tell it the server address from Nexcess, it works a little bit better. So I’m popping that in. You need to know the port number. Most SSH connections use port number 22. And so that’s the default. And so I populated that. And then you need to know your WordPress install path. And we actually have this Magic Auto Detect button here. And it does detect the server path from your website. And so a lot of times that works. And in most servers, I will say the vast majority of servers that works. But we’ve had some issues with it on Nexcess naturally. So so I’m populating the other path in there instead. And then you need to get your SSH username. A lot of times this is the same thing as the SftP or FTP username. And so if I hop over to the Nexcess interface here, you can see there’s the username here. And so this is not your WordPress admin username.

David Johnson 00:17:13 This is your SftP or or SSH username instead. So that’s what we’re populating in. And I’ve lost track of which tab I was in. Okay there it is. So I populated that. And then we’re using something called Public Key Cryptography to connect. So SSH can connect with a password a username and password. But the preferred way the more secure way is to use a public key instead. And you might say, well David. Why are you revealing your public key on a live demo in front of the world? Sharing your screen? Isn’t that crazy? And the answer is, actually, we call it a public key because it doesn’t matter who knows it, the world can know it, and only one server on the planet can generate the can make use of that public key, and that is the server that has the corresponding private key on it. So I’m not showing you the private key, but the Solid Central servers have or the Backups Next Gen servers actually have the the private key that can authenticate.

David Johnson 00:18:16 And then we give this public key is what we give to the hosting server instead. So I’m going to pop over to Nexcess here real quick. And in my account here I can open up the SSH key area. And I can say this is my Backups Next Gen Post Status demo key. And then I’m just pasting that value in. And once I have added that to my account at Nexcess here. And by the way, almost every hosting provider, even if you’re using cPanel, if you have your own DPS whatever, a lot of times there’s an interface where you can add the public key. So, okay, this this part is the part that’s probably newest to the most people. But if you’ve ever used SSH before, you’ll you’ll already be familiar with it. Of course. Once you’ve added that, to your account, as I just did, then, that’s everything that our servers need to talk to your servers. So if I click Server Connect Test Server Connection right now, we’re going to see if it works.

David Johnson 00:19:10 And this part did borlk earlier in front of the entire world also. So I just had a hilarious demo earlier today. But we’re going to see if it works this time, which I’m hoping that it will.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:22 Fingers crossed, fingers crossed.

David Johnson 00:19:24 I’m crossing my legs to at this point, just in case I could cross beard hair actually.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:29 You could, you could.

David Johnson 00:19:31 I don’t know if that helps.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:34 I don’t know.

David Johnson 00:19:35 All right, well, this is taking a second, which I don’t know the interwebs are running slowly.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:39 Yeah. And usually when we’re, you know, streaming it takes a little bit a little bit of your bandwidth.

David Johnson 00:19:47 A little bit yeah. So hopefully this will turn green here in just a moment. But have you, have you, are you an SSH user Michelle?

Michelle Frechette 00:19:55 I’ve never done it before. No.

David Johnson 00:19:56 Oh cool. I love it. So it’s one of those things. Have you heard of WP-CLI?

Michelle Frechette: Yes

David Johnson:The command line interface. Okay, cool.

David Johnson 00:20:03 So SSH is the type of connection that you want to establish to a server in order to make use of WP-CLI. And that allows you to run WordPress commands on a good old fashioned. It looks like a DOS window. If you remember the DOS days, as I know you and I do. NOt everybody watching this remembers the.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:22 CD space backslash.

David Johnson 00:20:24 Yeah, exactly. You know, the CD command works on a on an SSH connection.

Michelle Frechette: Does it really?

David Johnson: It’s a Linux command as well to change directories. It is. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:32 How fun. It is still a long time.

David Johnson 00:20:34 Yep. But you don’t have to use the forward slashes in the same way that the the, you know, whether it’s backslashes and forward slash. Anyway, this turned green. Isn’t this great? It did have a green light. So the green light means I can click finish up. And this is this. That’s it. So there’s two stages to the connection. The first one is we authorize WordPress to talk to our central environment so that we can show you this, this interface.

David Johnson 00:20:58 And then with this interface we do the server to server connection and it works. And in this case it was flawless which is great. That’s it. Those two pieces. And now our servers, our cloud servers at Solid WP are talking to the hosting server for this website, and they’re already backing it up. In fact, if I click view your first backup, I’m going to be taking over here to this timeline. And you can see that the backup is actually running right now.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:25 Nice.

David Johnson 00:21:25 So it’s doing the first backup. and what I like to tell people is the first time you do a backup, it’s going to take a longer period of time than it will on the day to day operation of the system, but it’s still lightning fast, so this will probably finish. This backup will finish here while we’re while we’re talking. But I wanted to show you the timeline real quick. Michelle, you’ve probably seen this, I’m guessing, but for anybody that hasn’t seen it, you can see that some things were happening during the day to day.

David Johnson 00:21:54 Like I was updating plugins. I deactivated a plugin earlier. This was another plugin update and you can see some other backups were happening. I actually have several sites connected. This is a demo account that I use, and some of the other sites here are connected, that, that belong to some of my other team members. And so one of the developers that works a lot on this product is named John Hooks. And he’s got a site here called Hooks Crane. You can see that. So if I if I jump back to the timeline, you can see some of the activities here. Like there was a backup running earlier today for that site. And this is the thing that I was mentioning earlier, right? When you’re when it’s time for you to choose which backup you want to restore, you’ll see. I have a restore button, and I have a create archive button on every backup that you see in the timeline. This is a demo account, so there’s not a lot of activity in here, but one of the things I’d like to do.

David Johnson 00:22:44 Let me filter this real quick. I’m going to filter this down to only show entries from one side. So this is this is the Hooks Crane site. And you can see that on this day 23 that’s today when this backup ran, there were six posts on that site. But on the 22nd there were only five posts. So this is this is the thing that allows you to see, like how many users were there and how many posts and pages were there, how many, how many uploads? This gives you a way to sort of know what happened between the backups, so that if you had like the worst case scenario in my mind is, well, the worst case scenario is probably the hosting company went belly up and the server doesn’t exist anymore. But, even in that scenario, by the way, you can use, Solid Backups Next Gen to restore, but the the sort of next worst scenario would be your site got hacked, right? And so they jumped in. They created malicious pages or they added their own user account or whatever.

David Johnson 00:23:40 So you can kind of use this to see what happened between the backups and in the day to day, if you’re publishing new posts or if you’re adding new, let’s say you installed a new plugin or whatever that would show up in your timeline as well. So just like, this timeline here where we have these plugin updates going on, you can see those kind of things. These were on a different site, but you can see them in your timeline and that can help you choose the right backup to restore.

Michelle Frechette: Sure.

David Johnson: Which is fantastic. And so we have one click restore. If I click restore, I won’t do this to to my, my good friend John, I actually restore to overwrite his site. But when you click restore, it does do a little. Are you sure? And you can decide whether or not to enable maintenance mode during the restore or not. So that might keep someone from making a purchase that would just disappear, let’s say on your WooCommerce site or whatever. But once you say yes, it kicks off a restore and off it goes.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:32 Then you get those angry emails. Where is my package?

David Johnson 00:24:35 Exactly. Yeah. No we don’t have a record of that order. Yeah. yeah. So earlier today I, I clicked the create archive button. So Create Archive will actually generate a zip file that you can download and do with as you please for a given site. But I did that earlier, for, for this particular, moment in time on this site. And, and you can see now I have a download button in a few minutes, this archive creation process will run and I’ll have a new, archive I can download. But, I mean, that’s really it. You’ve seen the magic.

Michelle Frechette: It looks nice. Yeah.

David Johnson: It’s it’s server to server. It runs every day. It runs a new backup. Each day we only backup the files that have changed on your site. So it’s truly incremental from that standpoint. We do get the entire database every day though. So we get the entire database, and then we only backup changed files. And that’s really where storage comes in.

David Johnson 00:25:27 You saw we had the opportunity to choose how long to retain backups. If I go back now to this site’s Backups Next Gen configuration, you can see I’m only going to use 24 bytes to back this up. And you might say, well, how in the world is that possible? Well, one, it’s a demo site, but two, we don’t have to store the WordPress core files in the backup.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:50 We already have them. Yeah.

David Johnson 00:25:51 We know what version it was of WordPress. So if you ever need us to restore or generate a zip like we’re doing on that other site, we’ll actually grab the correct WordPress file set and include it and either restore it or put it in the zip for you, but it doesn’t take up space in your backup. And, if you have a huge media library, of course, then you’ll that’ll that’ll show up as the estimated site size here. But we’re not going to use that every day when we back up. We’re only going to back it up once.

David Johnson 00:26:17 And then as you add new files to your media library, we’ll get them to. But anyway, yeah, that’s a quick demo of our product.

Michelle Frechette 00:26:27 Yeah. Pull up the pricing page. How does somebody make use of this? How do they add this to their.

David Johnson 00:26:33 Well, I’m so glad you asked. Yeah, absolutely. So on SolidWP.com we have the backups page here. And whereas a week ago this showed pricing for Solid Backups, what we’re now calling the Legacy Solid Backups product that was formerly known as Backup Buddy. It now shows Backups Next Gen. And so one of the things that’s different now, compared to a week ago, is that you’ll see we have storage amounts here as well with Backups, Solid Backups to the Legacy product and formerly Backup Buddy, storage. We did actually give you a gigabyte free of Stash, but it didn’t matter how many site licenses you bought, you got one gigabyte free of Stash and and and Stash Storage, which was our cloud storage solution, was sold separately so you could buy more if you needed it.

David Johnson 00:27:18 But you could also just use Google Drive or, not anymore, but you could use, back then.

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, back then.

David Jonhson: You could use Dropbox and you still can. By the way, if you still have Solid Backups, it still works. You can use, Dropbox, you can use Amazon S3 or, you know, whatever cloud provider that you might want to use with Backups Next Gen pricing includes storage. So like you saw when I bumped from the one side up to the five, and we’re actually giving you more storage room per site as you go up as well. So at ten sites you’re getting you’re essentially getting 30 gigs per site instead of 20.

Michelle Frechette: Wow that’s nice.

David Johnson: And this gets up to 40 gigs per site once you hit 25 sites. So that’s one of the things that’s different about the pricing is that it also you’re also paying for and getting cloud storage. It’s very inexpensive as cloud storage is concerned. But that’s included. You don’t have to buy it separately. And we’re trying to be really super generous with it.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:17 Yeah. Let me ask you, Black Friday is coming up. Will this be included in a Black Friday deal?

David Johnson 00:28:22 Okay. Well, I’m glad you asked. So right now, you see, this is this is showing you a discount. Right now. We have an introductory offer that’s underway right now. So if you decide to buy it, today is 30% off and that will continue for another week or so. There is a little bit of a better price for Black Friday. So if you if you’re thinking about it and you’re like, I don’t need a backup solution today, hey, I don’t blame you. I wait for the Black Friday deals, too. That’s cool. But one of the things that I will say that’s coming up with Black Friday, that’s not happening right now, is that not only will Backups Next Gen be on sale, and I and I, and I will say it is a little better price than what you see now. Not a lot, but a little bit.

David Johnson 00:29:01 But also the Solid Suite will be on sale and the Solid Suite if you haven’t seen that before. The Solid Suite is our product that bundles everything in 1 in 1 place. So let me skip this video. But if you look at the Solid Suite that will include everything, it includes Solid Security Pro, which includes Patchstack, which is our virtual patching solution that’s powered by the the magnificent folks at Patchstack. It includes Backups Next Gen and it includes, not only Solid Central, but also the Solid Academy. So, the Solid Suite actually includes quite a few things all at once. And so you get all of those. Actually, there’s more detail here. But anyway, that will be on sale as well for Black Friday. So if you’re looking at a deal, what I would recommend is that you get this Solid Suite in the Black Friday deal, because that will get you not just Backups Next Gen, at a nice, nice price, but it also includes Solid Security Pro and the Solid Academy.

David Johnson 00:30:05 That’s the only way to get the Solid Academy. Yeah, which is a hugely powerful,

Michelle Frechette 00:30:10 And what Solid Academy, if anybody isn’t familiar.

David Johnson 00:30:13 Oh I love to talk about Solid Academy. So Nathan Ingram, you know, Nathan.

Michelle Frecehtte: I do.

David Johnson: A superb human being is running this. Used to be known as iThemes Training. And so before that, I think I forget the name. It was like webdesign.com or I forget what it’s called that.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:30 Yeah.

David Johnson 00:30:31 It had a generic name.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:32 Yeah. There’s still there’s still an old Facebook group with that name on it somewhere.

David Johnson 00:30:38 Okay, cool. Well, the Solid Academy is weekly live streams. There are free live streams, but there are also just members only live streams. And it’s a huge, huge backlog. There are well over ten years, probably 15 or more years of, of content, courses you can take, in fact, like let’s look at some of the upcoming stuff. Well, we did this one today. This is where my demo went so badly that everything broke, which was hilarious.

David Johnson 00:31:07 But no, we have some, some really exciting upcoming, items. Let me let me look at the upcoming ones. I’ll show you right now. Office hours every week are fantastic with Nathan. He does a plugin roundup every week. There’s a I actually does it every month. I’m sorry, but, But there’s. There’s an upcoming live stream that deals with AI email, and how to make good use of that. Nathan is a fantastic trainer. He helps people run. Run a if you’re a freelancer or if you run an agency. Nathan is not only in the same business as you, and so therefore grappling with the same issues and questions that you are. But he is also a magnificent trainer, helps people learn how to make more money. So if you’re in the business of developing and selling WordPress services, sites, maintenance plans, whatever, then you’re going to make more money if you are part of the Solid Academy.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:01 Excellent.

David Johnson 00:32:02 Yeah. So I.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:03 Fantastic

David Johnson 00:32:04 Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:05 Awesome. All right. I’m going to take that off. Take that off. What else do you want? Running.

David Johnson 00:32:12 Oh my backup is still running. Sorry.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:13 Want to bring it back?

David Johnson 00:32:14 Oh, no. That’s okay. I was just I was I was just about to show the backup finished running. And so that’s available. That’s, that’s already done. Now for that. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:32:22 Fantastic. Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Yeah. Very cool. So you’ve got a pretty great team making some pretty great stuff.

David Johnson 00:32:30 Oh my gosh, I fell into the most magnificent team. As you know, I was previously on the Give WP team. And I was not in product management over there. I was on the support team, and so I was aware of the Solid team. I certainly was familiar with iThemes, but I had no idea until I joined the team just what a magnificent, magnificent group of people. I mean, some brilliant engineers. The support team is outstanding. Some of the people, you know, crossover of like Ben Meredith is a great example.

David Johnson 00:33:00 Ben is is the head of support for both Give WP and for Solid as well as Kadence and some other you know, he doesn’t he does great work in this organization. So there were people that I already knew. But wow, we have some amazing products and we’ve released two new products this year in addition to Backups Next Gen. We released a new performance plugin we had some help from other folks in the Stellar-verse that helped us build that. So Solid Performance is out now. And that’s a page caching plugins. Just the beginning. We’re going to do a lot of other things to help improve the performance of your site. But we also, dropped Solid Mail, which was a, an SMTP plugin that we acquired. It was previously WP-SMTP, and so that’s been rebranded and it’s got some new features coming. We’re really excited about that as well. And so it’s been really fantastic to work with this team this year. And I should mention Solid Mail. We had some help from some other folks as well.

David Johnson 00:33:56 Inside the, Stellar universe that helped us get that, that product updated and out. So we’ve benefited from being part of the Stellar family and a lot of interesting ways this year. But, yeah, it’s Solid, is great. And of course, we get to work with you too. Michelle. I love the fact like.

David Johnson 00:34:14 You and I have known each other for years, but but it’s only only in the last. I joined Stellar in July, I think of 2023. So, it’s just a joy to be able to pop into Slack and see your smiling face and.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:26 Aw your too sweet.

David Johnson 00:34:27 Oh, no, it’s absolutely the truth.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:30 It is fun, for sure. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing so much today. I appreciate that. I do have on the screen if people are listening. For more information, go to SolidWP.com/backups. Of course, if you’re looking for Solid Suite, just go to SolidWP.com. Hit that pricing, find all those different things that you might be interested in.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:50 And and yes, Black Friday is coming.

David Johnson 00:34:52 So yeah, it’ll be here before we know it. And then.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:55 For sure. Yeah for sure. It’s coming up fast. And last week, Topher DeRosa was supposed to be here, but he had bandwidth issues. He literally. I couldn’t get him on the screen at all. So he’s coming has been around for ten years already. And they’re doing a big.

David Johnson: Wow.

Michelle Frecehtte: Yeah, they’re doing a big push around their ten year anniversary and doing a little bit of fundraising. So we’re going to talk to him about what ten years of Hero Press looks like. The first time I ever heard of Hero Press, I was sitting in the very. I think it was either the first or second. I can’t because what so 20 yeah, had to be 2015. So it was probably the first year of WordCampUS. And Topher gave a talk about Hero Press, and I was sitting in the audience going, wow, this is amazing.

David Johnson: Isn’t it.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:42 Now he’s a good friend of mine, of course. And, I even have my own my own, essay on Hero Press about who I am. So it’s a pretty, pretty cool thing. So, yeah, about about what, ten years of Hero Press and talking about the global community looks like.

David Johnson 00:35:58 Oh, so many great stories. I, I tell you what, if you ever want to just have a motivational moment or maybe a tear jerker, just open Hero Press and pick you. It’s like. It’s like, you know, great story roulette. You know, just wherever you click, there will be an amazing story I love.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:15 There’s no bad thing. That’s right. Yeah. For sure. And yeah, and it is a community supported thing. So if you, if people are interested in supporting that, they do take donations and contributions to help keep it running. So we’re going to talk a little bit about more about that next week as well. So it’ll be good to have Topher on here to talk about that.

David Johnson 00:36:34 That’s awesome. I always love getting the hang out. I saw Topher this year at WordCampUS. I hadn’t seen him in a while, so that was really cool to get to.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:40 I know.

David Johnson 00:36:40 Get a few minutes.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:41 Yeah, and see, I got to see you in person as well. I got to se a lot of people.

David Johnson 00:36:45 Take a selfie with you, which is great. I loved all the fundraising that you did. That was so this was a good year. I was it your best year yet?

Michelle Frechette 00:36:52 Um, actually, last year was a little bit better, but all told, I think I’ve raised about $6,000 over the course of about a year and a half, to help get underrepresented people speakers, specifically speakers and, organizers to their WordCamps.

David Johnson: Wow I love that.

Michelle Frechette: So, yeah, it’s been pretty cool. And it’s been a it’s been an honor and a pleasure to be able to help people do that.

David Johnson 00:37:14 Oh, it’s so great. And I love opening my Twitter feed during any of these events and it’s like, hey, it’s Michelle with someone else, like.

David Johnson 00:37:20 Everywhere. It’s like there’s Michelle’s smiling face. Love it.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:24 It was fun. I can’t remember which one. I think it was in Asia this year. Somebody said that, you know, how you go to Twitter and it’ll say what you’re trending? Hashtags are on the right, and hashtag Michelle and me was trending for her, and I was like, that is so cool.

David Johnson 00:37:38 Oh my gosh, that’s amazing, I love that.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:41 That was a lot of it was a lot of fun for sure. Well, David, thank you so much. I’m glad you’re no longer under a tornado and that you were able to and we didn’t have any crashes Murphy’s law was not against us.

David Johnson: I know.

Michelle Frechette: That was a perfect demo, so I appreciate that.

David JOhnson: I’m grateful.

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Me too. And again, if people are interested, go to SolidWP.com/backups. Like I said we’ll be here again next week with Topher DeRosa. David, thank you and everybody else. We’ll see you next week for Post Status Happiness Hour.

David Johnson 00:38:10 Thanks, Michel.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:11 Thank you.