Two weeks ago I had a pretty significant hack occur on my hosting server. An investigation by my hosting company was never able to determine the original source of the hack, but in the end it gave me an opportunity to clean up some loose ends on the server and tighten up my overall security processes. In fact, I even moved my personal accounts and client accounts that I control to new hosting services at SiteGround.
While I was backing up and moving domains and client accounts I had a real opportunity to think about a better way to manage the WordPress installations that I am responsible for. Up to this point I have been managing each site individually. Although this is no issue when you only manage a couple of websites, it starts to get cumbersome once that number increases. And it really gets cumbersome when you find yourself moving many sites to a new web host.
So I started doing my research into the many services available that allow you to consolidate and manage WordPress websites. After spending considerable time pouring over the research, and doing some trial tests with the various services, I finally settled on ManageWp. Here’s why:
ManageWp – Consolidates Your Site Maintenance in One Location
If you’ve ever managed multiple WordPress sites then you know how cumbersome and time consuming it can be to keep the sites updated to the current WordPress version, backup and secure files, keep plugins updated, review and manage comments, clean up and optimize databases, etc. ManageWp allows you do handle all of these tasks from one common screen and in a single control panel. In addition, you can also run security and performance scans, create reports for your clients, and do a lot of other tasks that you’d either not be doing at all or that would take much time to accomplish.
Easy Backups
Backing up your websites is an important function. If you’ve never learned the hard way how important regular backups are you are living on borrowed time. In the past I have used a very nice backup utility plugin and it has served me well. A yearly subscription was required, but it was worth the money. The good news is that ManageWP comes with a great backup feature that I tested rigorously during my free trial period. The backups worked great, were easy to restore and the upgraded version of ManageWp even includes a cloning tool so you can move site from one server to another.
The cloning tool would have made the recent move from one hosting account to another much easier. In the future it will make developing client sites on my testing server and migrating them to their live hosting server much simpler, too.
As you can tell, I am a big fan of ManageWp. I committed today and upgraded my trial account to a full fledged professional account under the ManageWp umbrella. I’m looking forward to a long and successful relationship with the folks at ManageWp.
