Managed WP – Complete wordpress backups from GoDaddy or Harmonious Hosting

Note: Please get help if you do not understand the steps on this page. You will be downloading files and the database for your WordPress account. Downloading should be perfectly safe, but accidentally deleting or editing a file could break things.

I am a big fan of Harmonious Hosting’s Managed WordPress! (from the same folks as GoDaddy’s Managed WP). But there are a few drawbacks.

1. Plugin Limitations – To protect your site’s speed and stability, they will not let you install plugins that have been recognized as having a negative impact on site performance.
2. Free SSL Cert Limitations – SSL Certificates are becoming more important. They make it easy to install their paid SSL certs. But if you want to use a free certificate you will need to jump through a few hoops.
3. Full site backups – made daily, included in the cost of hosting. But if you want to download backups to your own computer, it will be a little more complicated. In this article, I will go over the steps I have taken to download full backups of my Managed WordPress sites.

You will want to do the following steps before any major updates and when it has been a while since you last got a copy of your files.

FTP to Download Files

Note: This step will get you a current copy of all your PHP files and images, along with a few other settings. These can be of high importance if a file is ever corrupted or in case you try an image optimizer that reduces quality too severely. You will still need to download your database separately. The database holds several settings along with most of your written content.

Connect with FTP

• Log in to your hosting account ( GoDaddy.com , HarmoniousHosting.com , etc…)
• Navigate to My Account > Products
• Expand the “Managed WordPress” section to find the site you want to backup.
• Click “Manage” next to the WordPress installation
• The “Settings” panel (lower right as of 5/5/2018) will have a link to view SFTP user. Click that.
• Be sure to Show your password so you can enter the settings into your FTP client. I use SmartFTP but know a lot of people who prefer FileZilla.

Note: You should be taken into the correct directory. However, if you find yourself in “Root” with empty folders and no files to download, try navigating from “Root” to “home/username/html” where username is the string you entered into FTP.

The above steps stopped working when I signed up for Cloudflare! Here are the adjustments that I had to make:

• Log in to CloudFlare.
• Navigate to DNS
• Add an A Record entry for ftp.example.com to point to your managed WordPress IP address. (should match the A record for your domain) Use “Automatic TTL” and click to gray out the cloud icon, so that “Traffic to this hostname will not go to Cloudflare”
• Edit settings in your FTP client so that the host name is ftp.example.com (as opposed to your original example.com)
• Try your FTP connection again. Connecting to ftp.example.com should bypass Cloudflare’s servers and take you right where you need to be!

Download from FTP

• Create a folder for backups on your computer.
• Create a subfolder named something like “Example.com backups 2018-05-05”
• Select the files from your website and copy/paste into your new folder. This could take several minutes or more, depending on the size of your website.
• You may want to zip this folder up to save space.

Download your Database

Did you know? GoDaddy and HarmoniousHosting give you access to the popular phpMyAdmin. This will make it easier for you to find help on how to work with your Database.

• Log in to your hosting account ( GoDaddy.com , HarmoniousHosting.com , etc…)
• Navigate to My Account > Products
• Expand the “Managed WordPress” section to find the site you want to backup.
• Click “Manage” next to the WordPress installation
• The “Settings” panel (lower right as of 5/5/2018) will have a link to view phpMyAdmin. Click that.
• Copy the link and login details and use them to get into your phpMyAdmin
• There will be a link to “Export” your database.
• Select All and choose SQL with “zipped” compression.
• With the click of a button, your zip file should begin to download

This step can also take some time. Make sure you have fully downloaded your database before proceeding.