Minimize or Prevent WordPress Backup Plugin Error

Website backup is the most important thing to consider once your beautiful and functional website is up online. There are various methods to do website backup, both free & paid options are available widely, all with the same purpose; to prevent total loss of whatever you have spent to build up the site.

Today we’re going to discuss one of the popular problem during backup process of WordPress based site using any backup plugin. Each backup plugin will have their own configuration and setup from initiating the backup process, scheduling, archiving files and also submit/send the backup files to remote folders such Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

So..our case study today is about:

Web Hosting Specification that Affect Plugin Backup Process

Most web hosting providers will not display their full server specification such as IOPS, Total Memory (RAM), I/O Usage, Number of Process, and others. These items are mostly affecting any shared hosting environment since the providers will have to limit their server resources among hundreds of users per server.

A details explanation of the above terms can be found in our previous post here:

Web Hosting I/O Usage, IOPS Limit, Entry Processes Limit – What You Need to know

If you’re happened to experience “Time Out Error” or simply the backup process took forever to complete, this problem could be caused by the server limitation itself which we do not have control over it, not like solutions within the PHP Options that we may have a way to modify the figures such as php_max_execution_time, max_input_time, memory_limit, etc. – Cpanel Users can edit these figures using the PHP Options menu.

Our study on how the server I/O Usage affect backup process:

• Backup Plugin used: All In One WP Migration
• WordPress Version: 4.9.2
• Total Backup size: 350MB
• Web Hosting Specs:
  • I/O Usage Limit: 2 MB
  • Physical Memory: 1.5 GB
  • IOPS Limit: 1024

While running the backup process, we refreshed the CPanel dashboard to check the memory & cpu usage. It is noticeable that the I/O Usage is being consumed to the max available. I/O Usage refers to how fast is the data read/write/rewrite rate to the server disk. In our case here, it was limited to 2 MB per seconds. So the larger the file size, the longer time taken to produce the single archived file on disk which may lead to time out or non-responding error. Also if there are other systems application or web scripts that running in parallel with the backup process, this will make things even worst.

Note: Standard web hosting I/O Usage is capped at 1 MB with 1024 IOPS (usually applied to most web hosting provider, please ask their support team to get the figures)

Summary:

• Higher I/O Usage limit = better & faster backup process.
• Ask for these hidden figures before buying any hosting plan: Memory Limit, I/O Usage, IOPS & No of process.
• Better to schedule backup process when server usage is minimum (received less traffic & no other heavy cron is running)