I decided to write a CodeGuard review after trying their backup service on our website. We wanted a simple way to backup our website remotely and without any complicated software to install on our server.
CodeGuard is the world’s #1 website backup and service. It’s a ready-made server that can keep track of all changes made to your web site and it makes it really simple to backup and restore from any time. In addition to the automatic backup service, CodeGuard also monitors your websites to highlight and detail any changes. This is a great way to detect unauthorized changes, such as malware, or just find a point in time you want to restore back to. You have the power to decide what you’d like restored: from a single file to a MySQL database, or an entire server.
How CodeGuard Works
1. Connect Your Site:
The first step in activating CodeGuard is to connect your website or database with their servers by giving CodeGuard your FTP/SFTP, and MySQL information. It’s that easy.
2. Initial Backup:
During this process, you’ll need to take a full initial backup of your website. The initial website or database backup is a complete data retrieval of all files that CodeGuard has access to.
Their website will provide real-time updates on it’s progress. Depending on the number of files and total size of your site, the initial backup can take up to 72 hours.
All backups CodeGuard takes are securely stored on Amazon Web Services servers, which is one of the most reliable large-scale hosting providers and this guarantees high availability of your backups and great uptime.
3. Monitoring:
CodeGuard now monitors your site daily for changes and alerts you via email if there are any. This is important to ensure malware isn’t changing files, or that something is happening without your authorization. Additions, modifications, and deletions between each version of your website can be viewed in your CodeGuard dashboard.
To reduce the loads on our users’ servers, CodeGuard only transmits the files that have changed, as opposed to complete backups each time.
Below is an example of what the backup history dashboard would look like:
4. Backup Again:
If the monitoring process detects any changes to the website source code, the files that changed or were added are transmitted to the CodeGuard repository. The same process applies to file deletions, and databases.
All backups after the first only retrieve the the files that were marked as changed during the monitoring process. If no changes are detected, the process ends after the monitoring step.
5. Restoration:
The final step is restoring your site to a previous version, when and if you choose to. Individual file restore can happen by just choosing what files in a particular backup you would like.
The automatic restore option will restore a backup fully but keep in mind: Restoring a whole site can be time consuming as a “pre-restore backup” is initiated to save everything before making an changes, and then all files on your server have to be replaced.
CodeGuard Pricing and Review
All CodeGuard plans allow you to backup an unlimited number of databases and feature daily, backups and monitoring, as well as email support. Two-factor authentication is available on all account which is a really nice feature for keeping your data safe.
Their cheapest plan begins at $5 per month (pre-paid for 1 year) and allows 5GB of storage per site. Additional sites can be added to the account for $5/m each. Considering many users will pay well over $5/m to host their website, this cost is not unreasonable, and a good investment for website owners.
The three “premium” plans add telephone support, client access, brandable portals, improved security, and advanced reporting. The plans go up to 100+ websites, from $5/m to $239/m.
CodeGuard is a user friendly and reliable backup solution that makes the process of backing up, very simple and pain-free. It also has the added benefits of monitoring which can help you detect intrusions, malware, and hackers. Overall, CodeGuard is better value for your money and provides a more complete service than competitors such as VaultPress.
CodeGuard Review Conclusion
Backing up your website is essential no matter how big or small your site is. You spend so much time and effort to build a web presence you need to protect it. Keeping a local backup of your website is great but service like CodeGuard make it easy to ensure your website is backed up each day. CodeGuard has a simple user interface where you setup your initial backup and then from then on you let it be. They will backup your site and email you daily changes on your backups so you know it’s always current.
I honestly haven’t come across anything this easy to use to backup a website. It’s affordable and takes little to no effort. I’ve recommended CodeGuard to a bunch of friends and everyone has thanked me, it’s just that easy.
Original Article by Chris M.
