Tag Archives: backups

WordPress

Improvements to Managed WordPress

2020Media is delighted to announce new features to their Managed WordPress hosting plans.

Global CDN Performance and DDOS protection

  • As a hosting partner for CloudFlare, we are delighted to offer the benefits of their free global CDN plan to all our Managed WordPress customers.
  • Websites load twice as fast on an international CDN and use 60% less bandwidh.
  • Cloudflare also blocks thousands of malware, DDOS  attacks.
  • “Railgun” an optional add-on for even more performance.
  • WordPress database optimisation done automatically to keep WordPress fast.
Cloudflare Distributed Performance and Security

Managed WordPress Backups

  • We efficiently auto-backup only the changes every 24 hours.
  • Your sites are safely backed up to Google Drive, Amazon S3 or Dropbox.
  • Stage an update to check integrity before making the changes live.
  • With smart update detection techniques, we automagically detect security updates and apply them on your WordPress sites.

Updates with complete Peace of Mind

  • Automatically backs up your WP site whenever an update takes place, be it an auto or a manual update.
  • Automatically checks your site after every update and notifies us in case of a bad update so that we can restore your site.
  • We can restore a specific file or an entire site or just the database. We can also restore your website even if it’s down or deleted.

Security Features

  • Regular security scans against the complete site.
  • Advanced bot blocking technology locks out intruders without compromising performance.
  • Alerts from Google Search Engine Console reports any problems with your site that might affect it’s search engine ranking.
  • Sucuri Malware scans to root out malware.
Your WordPress watchdog

Summary

“The 2020Media Managed WordPress service keeps on getting better and better” … Richard Clarke

If you’re looking for a faster, safer website, you’ve got a good start with 2020Media.  Contact us on 0370 321 2020 or email sales@2020media.com

Technical

Notes on Hyper-V backups

Windows Hyper-V allows backups to be taken of entire virtual machines extremely quickly. To do this, volume shadow copies are used.

Sometime however the volume shadow copy service fails to run properly. You might get an error like this in your logs: vss_ws_failed_at_prepare_snapshot or ERROR: Selected writer ‘Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer’ is in failed state. – Status: 8 (or Status: 11)

When this happens, the next step is to open a command prompt and type

vssadmin list writers

You may see something like this:

Writer name: 'Microsoft Hyper-V VSS Writer'
   Writer Id: {66rfg1cd4-6e5ed-4f4b-8417-fd23456dc3de}
   Writer Instance Id: {f0dreda9-1459-4632a-9861-51e45g6414a7}
   State: [8] Failed
   Last error: Retryable error

To try and fix this, go to the Services control panel and try restarting:

  1. Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management (note this does not cause running machines any problems).
  2. Volume Shadow Copy (optional – try 1 first).

In practice we find that just restarting the Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service is enough.  Run the command again and check if VSS is now showing ‘no error’ state.

vssadmin list writers

Then wait for your next backup job and check it completes properly.

There are a number of hotfixes available from Microsoft but we’ve not found a reliable fix for Windows Server 2008 (release 1). So far we’ve not seen the problem recur on Windows Server 2008 R2.

About Us

2020Media is an established UK hosting provider. We offer dedicated virtual servers with full root access on a variety of platforms, including Hyper-V. We also offer prebuilt and configured instances of popular open-source free software such as SugarCRM and Java Tomcat,  on virtual machine instances.