Around two years ago, Plex announced what was then a novel idea: The company had partnered with Amazon to launch a cloud-based storage solution called Plex Cloud, letting people who didn’t feel like setting up a home server effectively run a media server in the cloud. Now the era of Plex Cloud is coming to an end, as the service will shut down on November 30.
This news doesn’t exactly come as a complete surprise, as Plex Cloud has been plagued by technical issues for quite some time now. Despite Amazon being the first cloud storage service Plex Cloud supported — and in our own time trying it out, it worked fairly well — the service stopped working with Amazon Cloud Drive in late 2016. In February 2018, the service stopped letting users create new servers entirely. The company even hinted at the possible end of Plex Cloud, writing that “while we evaluate our options, we will continue to support existing Plex Cloud users and will communicate any service changes before they take effect.”
After November 30, users will no longer be able to access any of their Plex Cloud servers. The content itself will remain in place on whatever cloud storage service you chose to use if you were using the service, so you won’t lose any of your files, you just won’t be able to access them via Plex anymore. The company is encouraging users to set up local Plex Media Servers, but Plex isn’t doing anything to automatically migrate users’ collections from the cloud to local servers.
“We hold ourselves to a high standard, and unfortunately, after a lot of investigation and thought, we haven’t found a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost,” a notice on the Plex Cloud support page reads. “While we are super bummed about the impact this will have on our happy Cloud users, ending support for it will allow us to focus on improving core functionality, adding new features and content, and delivering on our mission to provide a world-class product that we can all rely on and enjoy.”
If you’re a Plex Cloud user that is interested in setting up a Plex Media Server on their own computer, be sure to check out our guide on how to do just that. To access all the features, you’ll need to be a Plex Pass subscriber, which costs $5 per month, $40 per year, or $150 for a lifetime membership, but since you needed a subscription in order to use Plex Cloud anyway, you probably already have that if you’re interested.
