Admittedly it’s a new product, but currently there is no elegant way to manually backup your WordPress site at GoDaddy WordPress Managed Hosting. GoDaddy does take a nightly snapshot of the files and database and keeps it around for 30 days. But if you want to rollback to a previous version, you have to call customer support and get them to do it.
It should be simple to backup your site
If you want to make a backup on your own, say just before you install a new theme or make a major change to the site, you should be able to just click a button and have it happen. Same thing with a restore point — point and click.
But currently with GoDaddy WordPress Managed Hosting plans you have to do it manually — meaning logging into phpMyAdmin and exporting the database and using a SFTP client to go grab your wp-content folder!
Inexpensive managed hosting is an ideal solution for my small business clients that are not particularly technically astute. It’s supposed to off-load some of the technical details that make keeping your site running kind of scary. So asking this type of site owner to configure an SFTP client to grab the contents of a folder on their server, or even worse use phpMyAdmin to export all the tables of their site’s MySQL database is just insane!
For security reasons, GoDaddy blacklists all backup plugins that I would normally use to make scheduled and ad hoc backups easy (though I did go ahead and installed and used Duplicator to grab a quick copy of the site.)
The good news
I found out from a supervisor while on a tech support call regarding the backup situation, that “in two to four weeks GoDaddy will roll out a backup and restore solution for the WordPress Managed Hosting accounts”
That sounds good, I’m looking forward to see how well they do this, and in the meantime I can wait and rely on their snapshots and an occasional manual backup until then.
Hi, Pieter. Few days ago, I read your post about giving GoDaddy a second change because of its new service: Managed WordPress Hosting. Now I read this and I’m not disappointed, but I hope they will improve the service. I just paid and start my professional blog with this new product (WP Engine is so expensive for me!), after 5 or 6 times I tried with a regular hosting… my sites were always hacked, even with plugins such as Wordfence and Better WP Security. I hope this time it would be successful. I’m going to keep reading your posts, hoping to find out more about Managed WordPress Hosting by GoDaddy or by other companies. Thanks a lot.
Hey,
Thanks for the write-up and the feature request. Customer support was accurate in their message that we will have an easy to use dashboard to perform restores soon.
Do you have other feature requests for the product? I’d love to chat so we make sure we are building the right things.
Thanks!
Felix Gorodishter
GoDaddy Software Development Manager – WordPress Initiatives
The problem im facing with godaddy wordpress hosting is unique,
im trying to protect my site for hotlinking and the plugins for hotlinking do not work with their in built cache, so moving to a vps.
duplicator will not move the site because hosting is managed, and they seem to have some setting that dont work, manual move will not work either, plus it’s not as fast as it should be
I find I can install the Duplicator plugin on my Godaddy Managed WordPress Hosting Plan websites, make a package (installer.php & .zip package), download the files, and then deactivate and delete the Duplicator plugin. So I can move a WordPress website from Godaddy to wherever.
As far as hotlinking, I haven’t had a problem with this on my sites, but you can edit the .htaccess file on your Godaddy sites via an SFTP client. You might want to check out a hotlink prevention suggestion at: http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html
Ran into a similar problem trying to move a site from GD Managed via BackupBuddy about two months ago. It turned into a big fail.
This was something I had specifically asked Godaddy about before purchasing hosting from them for purposes of developing sites. I was assured there would be no problem moving a site from them to other hosts. I really want to like their Managed Hosting but this problem, unless fixed, is a deal killer. I don’t know if this has been fixed in the last two months as I have purchased hosting elsewhere and haven’t been back.
I am also faced same problem with Godaddy with backupbuddy Plugin the problems is http loop back connection not enabled for fixing we need wp cron true to wp-config.php.
I tried manually from phpmyadmin and Ftp but i am getting 503 and 508 errors very sad. also getting low speed performance.
Finally i found WP-DB-Backup plugin referred by shoutmeloud.com. it’s schedules backups and mails to your inbox only db tables.for files we need to schedule our ftp client in low peak hour.
One of my site is running on Godaddy Managed wordpress,i want to change the hosting service how do i take backup from managed wp godaddy and restore it on other web host say (hostgator or bluehost)
Install the Duplicator plugin and follow the instructions. Or move it manually by exporting the database and copying your WP-content folder, just the way you would at any other host. Nothing different or unusual.
Hi
I am a new customer who just got managed WordPress hosting from go daddy.
I have uploaded my wp contents folder from local site unto my temporary domain but I’m having problems with my database.how do I edit the wp config file? How do I create a new database in my hosting account cos I just logged into my phpmyadmin and then imported my local database.do I need to change the details in my local wpconfig file?pls I need or assistance
Try Godaddy tech support for WordPress Managed Hosting, in my experience over many clients, they’re pretty good. That being said, the first choice for moving a site to Godaddy Managed Hosting is to use their migration script. You just need to supply the existing site WP admin credentials and the FTP credentials for your site and then just sit back an wait a few minutes. Their script will make a copy of your site and change all the internal links to use the temporary xxx.xxx.myftpupload.com url base (which you can easily change later to your domain). In my experience the migration script works about 85% of the time making a perfect copy of your site. The problems come from unusual WP configurations on the original site, non-standard directories in the WP folder. You may have to disable your plugins during the migration.
The other problem that causes the Godaddy WordPress Managed Hosting migration script to fail is the original site is located in a sub-directory of your domain, e.g. mydomain.com/wordpress. This will cause the migration script to fail 100% of the time. The work around is:
* use your host’s domain manager to create a subdomain for your website, e.g. wordpress.mydomain.com
* then point that the site subdirectory (
mydomain.com/wordpress.* make sure you go into your WordPress Settings General, and change the site location fields to use the new subdomain (
http://wordpress.mydomain.com)* then try the migration script again using the subdomain instead of the subdirectory for the site URL
That’s worked for me several times.
If all else fails and you need to manually export and import your database and wp-content directory using SFTP call their tech support because you must edit all your database table prefixes to match the Godaddy requirements before you import. Access to wp-config.php and all your other files is via the SFTP credentials you can find in your account settings. You’ll have to use an FTP client like Filezilla, no cPanel file manager for the Managed Hosting (it’s a security feature, not an oversight).
Hi Pieter Hartsook!
when duplicator plugin scan my goaddy managed wordpress hosting website it give an error which is mentioned below. please guide me what i should do please!
Name Checks Warn
File or directory names may cause issues when working across different environments and servers. Names that are over 250 characters, contain special characters (such as * ? > < : / |) or are unicode might cause issues in a remote enviroment. It is recommended to remove or filter these files before building the archive if you have issues at install time.
Duplicator will list the offending files, use your SFTP client like FileZilla to change the name, or use Duplicator’s “exclude” panel to exclude those, then when you want to restore, you’ll have the revert the names if necessary.
I would argue that UpdraftPlus is the best backup program for WordPress. It’s the most downloaded backup plugin on WordPress. this is the best plugin by which we can get out websites backup directly on google drive or any other cloud platform