Hi Damon, thank you for your feedback and comments. I’m the product lead for Jetpack (and VaultPress) at Automattic, and I want to clarify a few things, just to make sure that people understand where things actually stand today.
First of all, VaultPress has not been discontinued, and we still absolutely support all VaultPress customers. It is true that you can no longer purchase standalone VaultPress plans, but that has been the case for over a year now (https://blog.vaultpress.com/2016/12/09/announcing-simpler-more-affordable-pricing/). Instead, you can purchase a Jetpack plan, and VaultPress currently comes bundled within that plan, powering the backups and security scanning features. We understand that some of the ways Jetpack handles config/accounts/connections can be cumbersome, especially for developers building sites for other folks. We definitely welcome feedback on ways to improve that process, and will continue improving that over time.
The changes above are part of a bigger move towards integrating VaultPress’ security and backup features directly into Jetpack, giving VaultPress customers a smooth transition path over to Jetpack, and eventually deprecating VaultPress as a separate/stand-alone service. There are a number of reasons for this, but mainly it’s around combining our best services into a single flexible offering, which we can maintain to a higher standard, make more robust and reliable, and provide a better level of service around, both within the product itself, and via our excellent support staff who you’ve been interacting with already.
We’ve taken everything we learned from running VaultPress for years, and have built a drastically better engine into Jetpack (that new version is not available to everyone yet, but it’s coming pretty soon). There are most certainly rough edges still, and the state of things right now is definitely not where we’d like it to be, but we’re only human, and we’re working towards what we believe to be a better future for the vast majority of our customers.
Some people will not like these changes. Unfortunately that is just the reality with any change. When you build software for millions of people to use, it’s impossible for things to work exactly as everyone would like. We will continue to do our best to support our customers, and build products and services that meet and exceed the expectations of as many of them as possible. From what we’ve seen in user tests, performance metrics and most other ways we can measure it, we’re working towards something that’s better for most of our customers.
If you’d like to discuss any of this further, please feel free to email me directly on beau@jetpack.com.
