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:

  1. Excluding the largest directories in /wp-content
  2. Zip those
  3. Download those
  4. Backup the rest of the site with BackupBuddy
  5. Restore the backup
  6. Upload the Zips
  7. 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.

  1. Settings->Advanced, Zip section
    1. Click Settings in the left menu under BackupBuddy, then
    2. Click the Tab labeled ‘Advanced Settings / Troubleshooting’ – then
    3. Scroll down to the Zip section
  2. Enable Zip compression
  3. Select Alternate Zip System
  4. Set Zip Build Strategy to Multi-burst/Multi-step
  5. Set Max time per chunk to 90 (seconds)
  6. 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.