Magazine

Simplebackups.io : The easiest way to back up all your cloud hosted projects

Published

5 years ago

07/12/2020

Laurent: We met in San Diego, California where we were sharing a co-working space as well as a lot of coffee at our favorite “James Coffee” spot. Islam runs a web development company, has worked as a freelance web developer in the past on projects of varying scale and in different roles. Islam is based in Cairo, Egypt and has built a lifestyle allowing him to travel the world while at the same time growing his business.

I was the co-founder of the startup called Travelyo, delivering top notch SaaS for the E-Tourism business.
I’m based in Brussels and after the year I spent in San Diego, I decided to leave my previous startup adventure and moved back to Belgium. I teamed up with Islam on some challenging web-development missions.

In early 2018, about two years after we met, we decided to build SimpleBackups.
The idea was born out of simple statement: “We needed an easy, simple, and a reliable way to manage backups for our selves and our clients, period”. The alternatives were not convincing, either too expensive and sneaky with feature limitations, buggy, hard to setup, … there was room for a simpler solution that we enjoy to use for every new client project we build!

Table of Contents

Your products and services

With SimpleBackups, we offer an all-in-one website and database backups solution built for the cloud, that just works and is truly simple to use.

Our customers range from digital agencies, to developers, web hosts and startups.

We transformed the backups process to something that is just a few clicks, simple to setup, accessible from a neat interface, with all the integrations and tooling which a modern company wants.

On top of that, we took the privacy approach seriously by bringing many cloud storage provider as a off-site storage options users can leverage for their backups. Meaning that we neither own (nor host) your backups, but you do.

Whether you prefer AWS over Google, or DigitalOcean or any other cloud provider, you can connect it to SimpleBackups and get all your backups stored there. We put a lot of effort on our user experience by making sure any website/application as well as any database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB…) is backed up in just a few minutes.

Your success factors

Our first success factor will be that we are aiming for a full featured solution that supports most of the use cases we and our users encounter but still remains simple. This is key to us: any new feature we add has to bring value and should always guarantee that the application remains easy to use.

The second factor, is that we’re integrated with all major cloud providers (AWS, Google, Dropbox, Wasabi, Backblaze, Filebase, DigitalOcean…) and the list is continuously growing.

Finally I’d say we offer superb support (unmatched by any other service we have ever used), we’re a small team, and we cherish each of our users (whether free or paying users), we build a strong relationship with them allowing them to participate to the roadmap of our product.

Your factors differentiating and disruptive compared to the existing

Most of our competitors are system administrators or tech people that ended up building an application so their application will often contain a lot of feature, will be bloated, will not make the process as easy or enjoyable.

We think out of the box and introduce new features that even make the process simpler like backup error prediction, smart backup retries, remote backups, and being able to connect SimpleBackups to newly created servers automatically and without filling any forms.

We decided to put the user experience, and the ease of creating backups as our top priority I’d say that this is probably the key differentiating factor.

The fact that we offer support to several server / database technologies, and that our users can use our solution in numerous use cases to store their backups on their own storage, in addition to our support to so many cloud storage options is definitely a game changer. We slowly see our competitors following our lead on this and even getting inspired by our design and approach, even though we started recently, and that’s what I can call disruptive.

Your business model (how do you make money?)

We use a recurring subscription model where our standard plan covers most of what people need and offer them everything they usually hope to have.

There are no surprises or sneaky pricing techniques with feature limitations, you can either pick our free plan allowing you to have one full backup; or our paid plans with the standard plan offering what most users need without any limitation. You could also go for our highest plan if you have very specific high usage needs with some features that opens the application to a very scalable solution allowing users with hundreds of customers and servers to easily set everything up with the right tools and API.