I’ve been blogging for years, and the thing that’s always struck me as.. missing from the blogging world was a bulletproof online backup solution for WordPress blogs. Automattic recently launched VaultPress, which aims to be just that.

Personally, my own blogs backup by means of a server image every week and then automated backups onto Amazon’s S3 service – a setup which took me hours to perfect and automate, and I’m at least reasonably proficient with code.

The downside to this, of course, is that if aliens do attack, I have to manually restore everything – a process which (from experience) takes hours. Automattic’s service does it instantly, with absolutely no legwork by the end user.

The service is still in private beta at the moment, but I’ve signed up for my golden ticket to test the service out – I think that the pricing might blow some smaller bloggers out of the water, and in Automattic’s place, I’d offer another, far cheaper package for people new to blogging with little blogs – maybe this is something they could outsource to a third party, using their infrastructure.

I’ve yet to read any actual reviews of testing the service, but provided Automattic really do have this nailed, I think it could become a must have, or a sign of seriousness for people entering the blogging world.