WP Twin Review

WP Twin does a good job of quickly backing up your entire WordPress-powered blog. Now let's look at the other details in this review of WP Twin.

Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos launched WP Twin, and already lots of bloggers (and internet marketers) are testing this backup and deploy your blog type of script.

It uses PHP and allows you to easily clone your blog. You then take that WPTwin clone, upload it to another webserver, then "deploy" or expand it into another copy of your main blog.

Depending on your internet broadband connection as well as the size of your blog, it can take as fast as only six minutes to have a mirror or copy of your blog up and running.

There will be some minor tweaks that you have to do, though, because some WordPress plugins have settings that don't carry over to the blog clone. This means that if you don't use such plugins, then your second blog will look like just your first (except for the URL, of course).

So far I've tested WP Twin and you can easily clone your Dreamhost-hosted blogs. You can also deploy such clones in webhost providers such as Hostgator and WiredTree. Just note, however, that you need to coordinate with WiredTree support since they will have to set your webserver to run scripts as script owner instead of "nobody."

So, what are the implications of WP Twin? I use it mainly for disaster recovery.

That means that if the main blog goes down, then we inform our readers (via email) that they can head on over to the second site. Of course, this means that we've set the privacy settings of that second blog such that search engines cannot find it.

True, internet marketers have been talking about the duplicate content myth, but it still pays to be safe. Besides, there really is not intention to have that second blog appear in the search engine results, because its main purpose is to serve as a backup in case the main website becomes unreachable.

And yes, this is mostly applicable to evergreen content-based blogs and not to high-interaction blogs. Otherwise, someone will spend the whole day simply cloning and deploying blogs. If, on the other hand, this clone-and-deploy activity can be automated, then that would be something.

If you want more information about WPTwin, you can also read this WP Twin Review.

Or you can quit reading and analyzing, and start doing and taking action. :-)

[ First posted on 10/22/2010 by Manuel Viloria ]