Site Auto Backup Review: Hostgator’s cPanel Backup Service

In April we covered the launch of a new cPanel backup service, Site Auto Backup.

We decided to give it a try and see if it lives up to its claims.

Our Site Auto Backup Test

For the purposes of the test, we used a single VPS on Servint hosting around 12 domains. Six of these are busy enough to warrant daily backups.

We signed up for an account with Site Auto Backup that provides 5 GB of backup space for $4.95 per month. Our calculations suggested that this would be enough to create three backups of each key website on our VPS.

We then configured the service to connect to CPanel/ WHM on our Servint VPS.

Unfortunately there were some initial problems with the manual backup. Although most of the domains were backed up successfully, some of the larger ones were not. Finalising the backup on the largest domain took several attempts.

We then set up automated backups. We’ll come back to those later on.

The Pros of Site Auto Backup

Most of the sites were backed up as expected. The best results were seen with very small WordPress blogs. The 1 GB account, which costs $1.95 per month is more than adequate for this purpose.

Most of the time, Site Auto Backup detected new WHM accounts, which was a positive sign.

The Drawbacks of Site Auto Backup

During our one month test, we noticed a number of bugs in the Site Auto Backup system. We found five issues, four of which were serious enough to warrant a support ticket.

• The disk quota used did not update. This was fixed after a support ticket was filed.
• Old backups were not removed which caused the account to go over quota.
• We experienced a number of ‘disk full’ errors, even though the account had well over a 1.5 GB of space left. This problem is unresolved at the time of publishing this review.
• We received more than 40 emails about other people’s backups in a single evening. This was fixed after a support ticket was filed.
• A new WHM account was added to Site Auto Backup three times. This was fixed after a support ticket was filed.

Let’s not forget that the largest and most important site was not backing up consistently either.

Is Site Auto Backup Worth Using?

Despite the courteous support staff, Site Auto Backup isn’t a service we would recommend. It is fraught with problems and isn’t the hassle-free solution it promises to be.

For small sites, it would probably be OK. For larger sites, it doesn’t remove much risk at all.

Claire Broadley

Claire is a freelance writer. She works with us through Red Robot Media, which she runs along with her associate Mathew Dixon. In addition, Claire is an accomplished musician who has toured the world with her band Printed Circuit. She lives in the United Kingdom.