I used to use GoDaddy shared hosting for my sites.
A long time ago.
In a galaxy far far away.
And, just for my own peace of mind, I want to say it again – I USED TO USE GoDaddy shared hosting for my sites.
But I don’t use GoDaddy anymore.
And I don’t use Shared hosting.
But every now and then (more often than I’d like) I come across a client who wants help doing something and I want to get a good backup.
So I install BackupBuddy.
And try to backup the site.
And it times out.
Why does time out?
You know…I don’t really know. And, to be honest, I don’t really care. I asked iThemes support once about it (refer to the aforementioned ‘a long time ago’ comment) and it comes down to memory and php settings something about “GoDaddy shared hosting really sucks and you shouldn’t use it,” but I don’t remember the specific details.
How Do You Get Around It?
I typically got around it by:
- Excluding the largest directories in /wp-content
- Zip those
- Download those
- Backup the rest of the site with BackupBuddy
- Restore the backup
- Upload the Zips
- Extract the contents
And hopefully everything is good to go.
BUT, just the other day I came across this Short Hill Design article which offered up some specific steps that totally worked!
Here are the steps iThemes.com support gave me to try to make BackupBuddy work with GoDaddy shared hosting — and it worked.
- Settings->Advanced, Zip section
- Click Settings in the left menu under BackupBuddy, then
- Click the Tab labeled ‘Advanced Settings / Troubleshooting’ – then
- Scroll down to the Zip section
- Enable Zip compression
- Select Alternate Zip System
- Set Zip Build Strategy to Multi-burst/Multi-step
- Set Max time per chunk to 90 (seconds)
- Set Max content size for a single burst to 20 (MB) – leave Min at default 10
Thank you @ShortHillDesign for this! Saved me a big headache.
Native Texas, Logan Seth Ramirez is a computer science graduate from Trinity University and lives in San Antonio with his wife and four children. Along with being a web hero, he authored The Groom Wore White Socks, sings and songwrites as Logan Seth, and his favorite Spanish word is cacahuates.
Hi Logan! So glad we could help!
Hi,i have no advanced options sections in the Backupbuddy.What’s the version of your Backupbuddy?
Hi! An 8.x version, but I could have sworn advanced options have been around a lot longer! Hmmm…..
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have very few sites on GoDaddy but those that I do have are a nightmare to backup.
I cannot find the location for step 1 “Settings –> Advanced, Zip section”!
The BackupBuddy option in the sidebar has no settings sub-menu ; the settings option in the sidebar has no Advanced or Zip sub-menu…
I updated the steps above to be even more step by step. Hope it helps.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’m trying to leave godaddy as we speak. I had a VPS with Greengeeks (worse than godaddy) so where would you all recommend I go next.
I moved exclusively to SiteGround a couple of years ago. I have a referral/affiliate link if you want to check it out!
https://www.siteground.com/?referrer_id=7512597
L
I’ve been coming back to find this guide time and time again- so I owe you some feedback.
These settings don’t only work on GoDaddy shared hosting, but all shared hosting plans, VPS servers and dedicated servers. You’ve saved me so much hassle and stress, and I believe these settings should be default with BackUp Buddy.
So thanks for taking the time to write up this guide!
Glad it helped and thanks for the feedback!