UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is designed to only run a single process at a time - i.e. no parallelisation. So, it can only use one CPU core at a time, and there can only ever be one UpdraftPlus process that is reading from disk or writing to disk at once. It will also be subject to any limits you (or your web hosting company) configure via the PHP or operating system configuration. As such, UD's design means that it uses as low resources as is possible. Via only running a single process at once, UpdraftPlus is doing all it can from where it sits to limit its own resource usage. There really is no other "internal" solution that can work across the huge variety of hosting and server setups that exist. If you have particular requirements for your server, then you need to configure them at the server level. If you are the one configuring/running the server, then you should also spend some time on tuning your server, particularly the database - a lot can be done here. So, what can be done to limit resource usage if I don't have access to configure the web server? Configure the timing of your backup to run overnight - via the "Fix Backup Time" add-on, if you don't already have it. In the "small hours" of the morning, servers are usually very lightly loaded, with lots of spare resources. Make sure that your webserver really is adequate for the task. Experience has shown us that a lot of folk are "penny-wise, pound-foolish". Bargain-basement web hosting that saves you a few dollars a month almost always comes with a trade-off. That trade-off is that resources are very tight. If your site is big or busy enough that backing it up requires significant resources, then it's probably also having enough visitors that the bargain-basement web hosting is cutting performance enough to chase away some of those visitors. Alternatively, if you have sufficient access and expertise, then you can run the backup job from the shell, and use your system's "nice" and/or "ionice" commands to limit resources whilst it runs. (Those commands are on Linux, Mac and other UNIX-like systems - on Windows there will be a different solution). Check that you don't have any plugins that create enormous, mostly useless, database tables (e.g. some statistics plugins that record a new row in the database for every single visitor). If you store a lot of files, then go into the 'Expert settings' section of the UpdraftPlus page, and reduce the default setting for how much data is stored in each zip file. e.g. Reduce it from the default of 800Mb down to 100Mb. This will mean that UpdraftPlus spends less time in manipulating large zip files - which can get quite time-consuming, especially on slower servers. My web hosting company says that I can't store backups on my site, but can store them remotely. Can UpdraftPlus handle this? Yes. UpdraftPlus has various options for remote storage - e.g. Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, FTP, etc. Naturally, it has to actually create the zip file(s) to be stored remotely before it can then send them to the remote storage and then delete them from your site after sending them. There will be a short time gap in which the backup exists on your site before it is despatched and deleted. This should be fine with all web hosts that say that they allow you to create backups and store them remotely - because there's no other way of doing it. It should be especially fine if you use UpdraftPlus's feature (in Premium or via the Fix Time add-on) to run the backup in the small hours when the web server will only be lightly loaded. If they don't like it being done that way, then they are basically forbidding you to make a zip-file-based backup. Time to find a web hosting company that's not selling crippled hosting.