Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, David Walmsley, Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once more, this is episode number 233 entitled store your media library in the cloud with the infinite uploads plugin. It was published on Thursday, the 10th of June, 2021. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits and pieces of housekeeping just before we begin, I'd encourage you to go over to the WP Builds.com website.
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That is true as well. You can check it out. Get a free [email protected]. Okay. We are on episode number 233 of the podcast today, as I said, it's entitled store your media library in the cloud with the infinite uploads plugin I'm joined today by Josh daily. Who's the co-founder of the plugin. And we talk about why you might need it.
Basically, it comes down to convenience and speed. The idea is that they will suck up all of your media library content. So they're super fast CDN with 50 plus points of global presence and serve it from there. Obviously there's benefits to that. You get to have it served via a CDN. And so it should be a lot quicker.
And also you don't have to worry about altering the interface and using some kind of SAS app it's all done from the media library. So we get into that. We talk about how it works, what it does. We also talk about what would happen if you decided to back out and stop using it. In other words, how could you walk away from the plugin and how do they ensure that everything is kept safely?
There's a lot to talk about. Really nice chat with a really nice guy. I hope that you enjoy it. Hello there. Welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, you've reached an episode today in which we're going to have an interview and I'm joined by Josh daily. How are you doing Josh?
Josh Dailey: [00:03:54] I am doing fantastic.
Bright and early here in Phoenix, Arizona. We're at a. About seven o'clock in the morning to catch with you. So it's always a joy. And an honor, though, I get a chance to chat with you. You are
very kind may recognize,Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:13] the voice that you're hearing because Josh hasn't just recently come into WordPress.
He used to have a job. Over at WPMU dev. And he was involved in many ways. His voice was the voice of WPMU dev, but we're not talking about that today. We're talking about a product which is new to the market and therefore of great interest to all of us. I'm going to right off the bat. Say, if you, if you've got any queries about this, you want to pause it, go to this URL, because this is where everything is happening, that we're talking about it.
The product is called. Infinite uploads. It's a WordPress plugin and the URL is exactly as you'd expect infinite uploads.com. So Josh basic question to start with, what is it, what is infinite uploads
Josh Dailey: [00:05:01] in short, a way to move your entire media library and actually your uploads directory. To cloud storage to save on hosting and bandwidth costs that you would incur otherwise.
But on a more fancy technical kind of side, there's huge benefits around the process because a lot of people have heard about stateless, WordPress, headless, WordPress, decoupled, WordPress, and essentially what we've done is made that process a one-click. A process, you click a button, runs, a scan asks if you want to sync.
And it pushes all of that content to the cloud for you without you having to do anything. So it turns WordPress. Or, or your media library into a stateless WordPress application. Is
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:59] it just taking things from the media library or do we have choices in there too? I don't know. Scan around inside the WordPress install and look for other areas or is it just everything inside you know, the storage for the media library.
Josh Dailey: [00:06:13] Yeah, it's not just the media library. It's actually the uploads directory. So there's some other small benefits that, that we didn't even recognize. We were going to get Things like if you're using a page builder with a say element or they create a CSS code file that is stored in the uploads directory, that doesn't go to the media library.
And it's a, it's a compressed down, file that they have. And that file then would go to infinite uploads. Be stored in the cloud and serve your code files from the CDN as well.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:55] Okay. Well, that's, that is unexpected benefit. The, the options are, I'm guessing primarily most of us will be interested in, media assets.
So things like images and video and possibly MP3 files for things like podcasts, but. But is it agnostic? If you put anything, if you upload anything, does it drag it along for the ride? You know, PDFs or any kind of strange document that you might have
Josh Dailey: [00:07:21] come across? Yeah, it does. Anything that you could put into the uploads directory or that uses WordPress upload directory.
So they. There's like a lot of ways that we could talk about what are the benefits. And it would really depend on what your site is. And we're aware that this is not going to be for everybody because the real benefits kick in. If you have either a lot of sites or multi-site network or. A lot of media content that you're trying to work with.
Examples of that are learning management systems, where you may put video files, your images and all this stuff that you're doing to create a course that people can use. But then also you may have the option where at the end there's coursework, somebody has to do, and you're going to review that work.
They're going to upload. A PDF document, a zip file, some kind of thing too, that you're going to review. And so your immediate library and the uploads can get real heavy, real fast, and it can cause a lot of problems for both performance and then overage costs and bandwidth and storage.
And so this is an offset for that. The other big one that we could. Talk about as e-commerce so lots of images, lots of video content, but then on the digital download side, if you're selling your really high quality images, those have to be delivered back to the customer. And this is a way to pull that off.
And usually people use something like an S3 or digital ocean or. You know, Google cloud services to pull this off. And so we're essentially a stack that's comparable to that. You wouldn't want to think of infinite uploads as a comparison to like a Dropbox or, or where you put your phone storage, because that's a very different kind of use case.
And it's mostly for storage. This is storage and bandwidth. Delivery back to the site. Yep.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:49] Yep. One of the kind of benefits that I could see right off the bat was the fact that it may enable you to make different choices about the kind of hosting that you want for your WordPress website. So obviously we've now in this scenario, we've got infinite uploads in our WordPress website.
We've decoupled the media library and anything that was in there. So now we've just got WordPress, just WordPress, and it occurs to me that. You could really have a different experience going out, shopping for your hosting. If all that you had to do was host the WordPress files push them, create the pages.
And what have you, is that something that sort keen to sort emphasize with this? Does it enable you to perhaps choose a lower price point in the hosting environment that you're looking for?
Josh Dailey: [00:10:42] Yeah. So kind an interesting conversation that you could work around because I do think there's still benefits to solid, hosting and performance, obviously with first bite to delivery and those kinds of things.
I you're gonna, you're gonna want a high performing host, but it could be that instead. You won't have to go up to the next plan. So you could stay on the lowest plan of your preferred host, or you could essentially I've tested on. On some of the, I don't want to call it cheap hosting, but the
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:28] affordable hosting, affordable
Josh Dailey: [00:11:30] hosting, more affordable huh options.
You could definitely use it there as well, or a shared hosting solution where you would normally start considering upgrading to something a little bit more aggressive in, in. If you were running out of storage and bandwidth, you would probably start considering upgrading. And so instead of having to move off of your shared hosts, you would just be able to move.
The media
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:01] content. Yeah. I'm just thinking that so often when I'm browsing around, I look at WordPress hosts a lot and the pricing points are very often limited or constrained. Shall we say to the amount of sometimes it's bandwidth, but very often it's also just the amount of. Hard disk space.
You're going to get, be that 10 gigabytes or 20 gigabytes. And this kind of removes that because in this scenario, in a typical scenario where we're using infinite uploads, I'm guessing that really you've only got WordPress core files. That's it right. Maybe a few, I don't know, theme files and CSS files and things like that, but mostly it's going to be in media.
And obviously if you've got a site where. You are delivering, you don't need the site to be super-duper performance. Maybe you've got a learning management system or something like that. And you've got a few, possibly a couple of concurrent users, but you are chocking videos at them all. Then this could be really beneficial in that way.
Josh Dailey: [00:13:02] Yes, most definitely. And because the package for WordPress is really small. It's not too large. And once you get everything in place, if you're not using this and that's kind where I was headed. But with that at the beginning was just saying that we were aware that this is not going to be the solution to everybody.
If you're a small blog, if you are a, even a local business or you're building sites for a local business, they're one single site. You may never see them cross 500 megabytes of storage. And we definitely don't want people to feel like there's some huge, massive benefit by moving their one little site over to this type of a thing, because you're your hosting storage is going to be plenty.
But I will say that in general, and I just had assumed this because I'm less. The less technical of the, two of the co-founders my good friend and I who put this together. We've been friends since fifth grade and he's quite literally a genius. I don't know, I wouldn't be doing this without him.
But Aaron is really, yeah, gifted in what he does. And um, When, when we put this together, it was to provide us a solution that allows people to scale infinitely with WordPress, because WordPress is obviously this free and that the idea and people there's, millions and millions of people using it to run their websites.
And in general, I think people don't understand that the best way to deliver like a video file is not from your media library directory. The best way is actually free cloud storage. So this is early on. And I came into this because I done a lot of work in nonprofit organizations. And so they would go, Hey, we want to have a video background or we want to have You know, some training videos or audio files for a conference that we put on and these large files and we're doing a podcast or whatever that is.
And so we would go, okay, let me set up for you and S3 account. And then they're having to go figure out how to use. An SFTP client to access those files. And if they have a large volunteer base that they have to go back to and train on this stuff, now they're moving way past the scope of just logging into my WordPress site and everything just works too.
Now I have to also understand cloud storage and how this works and how to, um, You access it and upload things. And so it adds a layer of complexity, but what we end up doing then is going the alternative is just to say there's the storage here. That's built into your website. That works for the person.
It's not the best way or the right way. It just. Is what it is. So let's go with this because it's less complex. And so we wanted to take that experience and go, why can't this just be easier for anybody to use and we'll deal with the complexity of that by creating something that just does it, and then you.
Continue using your media library as if it was before, but now your volunteers, your new hires or yourself doesn't have to fiddle around with trying to understand cloud architecture. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:14] Speaking of easy. How does it actually work? If I've had a little bit of a look at it with you just before we recorded this, and I obviously know the answer to this now, but for the purposes of everybody who doesn't know what, what's the experience?
Where do we find the plugin? Do we have to pay for the plugin? Is the plugin free. And then once we've installed that what's the experience. How do we get files that are currently in our media library up into the the cloud.
Josh Dailey: [00:17:43] Yeah. So infinite uploads, the plugin itself is free on the WordPress repository and there is no premium version.
It is just the connection tool to getting to your storage and your bandwidth. So this would be a distinction. From other cloud solutions, we're definitely not the first to help you connect to cloud storage. The, the difference is there's no, we're not a third party connection tool though. So we're D we don't have to charge for a per site license.
You don't have to pay for the per file stuff. It's just the. You connect to infinite uploads and that's what we're providing to you is the storage and the bandwidth. So the experience would be you download the plugin. There's a button that you click to scan your. Your site files to find what's actually here.
And we like to call this the smart connect process, because we want people to see what they actually have, what kind of storage they're going to need, and then we'll give them an estimate what plan is best for them based off of that storage. Okay. Now the nuance inside of that is that I also believe that most people with a single site.
If they're an individual site user, unless they're in one of those rare cases of the learning management system or the e-commerce store that has a large directory, the infinite uploads cloud is going to be better for somebody who has maybe say 15 sites that they're managing or a multi-site network, which we haven't even started talking about yet, which.
This is the same technology that we've used to scale large multi-site networks to say 20, 20 terabytes, 90 million images, this is the same code base. So this is enterprise. Scaling at its finest and making it available to the lowest, to the, to the basic consumer level. So, so in terms of stability, we've already used it for this kind of use case.
But so, so you would scan that and it would say the, the base plan might be enough for you. It's a 20 gigabyte plan, but you can then. Upgrade downgrade. There's no contracts to whatever plan is best for you. So you could start with that basic plan. It will have you click the connect button once it gives you this and that the interface looks similar to.
The disk utility on your computer. If you've ever used that, like what's, what's on my computer, I've got this many media files, this many audio files, video files, archive, files, whatever that is. And we tell you all of that. These are all the files that are used. Your uploads directory. You can click connect.
It will take you over. If it's your first time connecting, you'll create your account. Choose your plan. And then once you've done that, the, it has you choose between storing the files in Europe or in the United States. That's currently where we have storage facilities at those. So those will not have an impact though on.
The delivery part, because we do deliver everything from a CDN, which has 45 points of presence. So the storage is more for your own benefit. If you have different regulations in your country and you need to follow those. Yeah. That was why we wanted to do that. Plus if you're uploading from the United States, it's just convenient to, it's a faster process too.
Push those that way. So after all of that's done and I it's it sounding talking through, it makes it so sounded like
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:14] a lot, literally takes four seconds to do
this thing. It's a reallyJosh Dailey: [00:22:19] fast process. So once you've chosen your location, you it will automatically connect your site up and you just hit.
Do you want to sync, this site sends you back to your WordPress dashboard. You say. Yes to that. And then it starts porting the files for you. Okay. For automatically. And then anything after that point will automatically bypass. So there's another distinction is that it doesn't hit your or hosts storage or bandwidth again, because it doesn't even go there.
It's not like a reroute. It actually automatically goes when you upload something is going to infinite uploads from that point on. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:09] Yeah. You w when we were when we were having our little discussion, before we hit record, there was a, quite an interesting moment where you described the fact that.
You can back out at this point, whilst it's uploading the files, it's not deleting them, you're uploading them. And you've got this sort of like insurance policy, whereby if, for reasons unknown, you decide, you want to back out, the files are still there and you have to actually go into the interface and say, I've established, this is all working now. Let's delete them and re remove them from our local storage for want of a better word. So that's quite a nice that's quite a nice little insurance policy. Should things go pear shaped or, you just decide you don't want to use it. Yeah.
Josh Dailey: [00:23:57] So something that's really important to note about both Aaron and myself, is that a lot of the places that we've had the privilege to work for.
When we work on something, if the plugin breaks, if something goes wrong or even if it doesn't go wrong. And there's just a perceived breakage, like with something like smush Aaron wrote the API for smush and developed the original versions of that. And you're talking if that goes down. Over a million websites.
I think it's almost 2 million now all their images would disappear and it would, that's a scary thing, right? That's a, that's an, even if it's just the perception that's going to happen. So somebody goes in and if you look through the negative reviews of something like that, most of the time, it's it didn't work.
It broke all my images, but the reality is it didn't break their images. It may have been a caching issue. It may have been. A whole slew of other things. And so there's still that a similar functionality that's taking place here where we're moving all of your media content. And if you go right back to your site and you haven't cleared the cache, it may look like everything's broken.
And so we have to do everything we can to eliminate those fears, to ease people's tension around this and understanding like as a new company, especially, even though we've been in the game over 20 years together working on this and we've done things that are at massive scales, people don't know that about infinite uploads yet if they don't know us.
And so we're having to regain that trust. So every step along the way we're going, I. We've got to make sure, first of all, that people aren't going to lose their data when they're doing this transfer. And then not only do we have to make sure they're not going to lose that. And that to me is the easy part.
Even in beta testing, I haven't lost anything. I've if I've, if it's broken anything, it's just an issue of reconnecting back or whatever that was in the beta testing phase, but I've, it's yet to have a problem where we've lost any content. And. And so in that kind of conversation then is not just, are we keeping people's content safe?
Are they perceiving that their content is safe, which is a whole different conversation. And that first moment of magnified disabled, the uploads directory and I'm decoupling this. Yeah. Am I going to lose everything if I do that? And so as a fail safe, what we did was which. We haven't had to use, obviously, but that makes people more comfortable as they can do that.
If it looks like something broke to them and that's the perception they get, they can actually deactivate the plugin and it will fall right back to their existing files that are in the local drive. If everything's working the way that you want it to, you can hit that delete button and it will free up all that space.
So this morning, I was showing you a site with. Nine gigabytes of files that we were using for testing and the account that's on, only allows you to have 10 gigabytes on the hosting side. And so. I can now essentially delete all nine gigabytes of that. And now it takes the site back down to the original 500 megabytes for your hosting.
Yep. And, and then that site, all those files are being delivered and served from the cloud.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:57] Yeah. So we upload all the files. We watch that process happen and then there's safe in the knowledge though that nothing has been deleted until you manually. Make the decision actually, I've been using this for a couple of weeks now and it's working.
Okay. Okay. I'll go and click the button, delete the files on and off they go. Yeah. Obviously the sort of reverse situation would be interesting to explore. And what I mean by that is the option to disable infinite uploads and know that you've still got access. To the files. So what happens on the other end?
Should we decide to disable this on a site or we for a variety of reasons may want to just deactivate the plugin? How do we get those assets
back again? So if you Josh Dailey: [00:28:41] just went in and deactivated the plugin itself, and you had everything deleted the file, the dis it would disconnect from the CDN, but the files themselves we store for Ah, man, I'd have to look at the exact terms of service, but I think it's a month and a half.
Okay. But we actually store the files for it. After you've canceled your account. After you've told us you don't want it. So we're not deleting anything, unless you go in and delete it off of our servers. Even if you disconnect, like they're going to sit there for another month and a half after your accounts canceled, completely done.
But. Uh, so, so after that process, if you were to re-install the plugin back, you could connect back to that library at any point. So think you had already mentioned the possible of easier site migration, better site migration experience. So let's say you're working on a staging site, you've done everything for a month on there.
You've uploaded images, you've done all kinds of stuff you could. Essentially DECA disconnect your staging site and reconnect back to your a live site. Once you've pushed live and all that media content would just be sitting there waiting for you to pull it in. And it does all of that redirect process for you, the image, a remapping, all of that's handled through the CDN.
You don't have to do any of that. If you were saying, I want to leave. I've got three gigabytes of storage up in infinite uploads, but I want all those files pulled back in. There's a, once you click disconnect, infinite uploads, it's not a premium feature. It's a built-in feature. Everybody gets it. It just starts downloading everything back to your local directory.
We, we don't own your content. We don't want to own your content. We don't want to have rights to your content. So all of this from a security perspective and an ownership perspective is a big deal. You're not storing it on say a YouTube or even a Vimeo where, um, some of these different, so more social platforms have different rules about how they handle it.
This would be all your own. Ownership ownership of your content. Yeah. Yep. And so we're going to make that as seamless of a process for you to go. I'm going to be able to pull this content back in. And I think it's important to note about us as, or myself at the very least is I really don't want somebody to have to use this.
That doesn't need it. It's like this is a product. That, when we came up with the concept and started working through it it's going to benefit somebody and there's a right type of audience that needs this. And that's the people I want to get this to. And either you need it or you don't a thing.
And so I don't feel this need to oversell the product to people. Yep. And if they accidentally get there for some reason, or Hey, this isn't what I need. I want to be able to leave. We wanted to make that process seamless. So you click disconnect, all your files, start importing back in and no love lost.
So you can. Then close your account and walk away.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:23] That's an important thing to say, isn't it. You know, we at some point, if we've committed to infinite uploads in the past and we've deleted our local media, you mentioned that from that moment on anything uploaded to the media library will not touch the local storage.
It will go directly through. To your your cloud storage and so important to know that at the end, you can just with a button, get it back. And I watched the process. Basically, you literally click a button and you get a progress bar and you just watch all the media files come back and presumably they're titled exactly as they were before, everything should then just return to how it was.
And in an ideal world, I guess all of the media would be served locally. And Bob's your uncle, that's it. You're done.
Josh Dailey: [00:33:11] Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And we all have an uncle named Bob. Yeah. So that's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:17] not a phrase in the United States.
Josh Dailey: [00:33:19] We say that, but I heard it in the outward camp Europe, and I thought that is the best thing it's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:27] just basically means.
And you're done. It's finished. Yeah. Yeah. Just about that, I'm interested from a sort of security point of view. Do you actually have a, no, this is like the most edge case of. Possible scenarios. I'm going to ask anyway, I'm just interested to know, do you actually have oversight and can you inspect what people upload?
Let's say for example, that somebody from, I dunno, the FBI decided to usual service. Can you actually see that media or is it sort encrypted on the fly? What sort of security measures are going on there?
Josh Dailey: [00:34:01] Okay. We do have a lot of encryption follow kind of the same. Think of principles in terms of that.
As far as me being able to go look at your media content, that would be an Aaron question. I I'd have to cause I, I don't fool around with cloud side of that and what's going on in, in there. So he may be able to I don't. That's okay. That's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:31] okay. Yeah. Let's talk a bit about the technology there because a lot of people will say, I pay for my premium hosting.
They seem to have a fairly decent reputation at serving my media up. I've got no, no quandaries with that. It's all fine. Tell us about the stack of technology. That's underpinning all of this, Tell us a little bit about the CDN and where the files are stored. And obviously the prime purpose of using this is to, to, you know, make it simple, but also hopefully to make it fast.
So what are the assurances that you've got around that?
Josh Dailey: [00:35:04] Yeah. So from a stack perspective, we have used Backblaze for storage, we're using Amazon cloud services for. Interconnecting and are lacking everything. And then StackPath CDN is where we're serving the content from. So that's the technical side of this.
Very interesting to note probably then would be that the cost of storage and bandwidth delivery are two different types of things which this took a lot of. Things a lot to, to figure out how do we market this appropriately? Because if you start just comparing storage costs to say like a Dropbox or whatever, people get really confused around that concept.
And it's because the cost of bandwidth and redelivering content is a different process than just storing your files and. Bandwidth costs are actually eight times the cost of what storage costs. Um, and so we're a specialty hosting company that only hosts media content, just like a managed WordPress host specializes in hosting only WordPress sites.
And, and we've optimized for delivering that content. Back to end users, not just for storing and holding content in a place, but actually the redelivery of that, the redistribution of content. Um, with all of that in mind, when you think about setting up and here's the tension points, when you're setting up some other services, if you're going to go through and go I'll just figure out how to do AWS.
They've. The plugins that are exists now are amazing plugins. And I think you've had some of those guys on before they've done a fantastic job around providing easy solutions for trying to connect a cloud service, but it doesn't stop at that point. You have to also create the cloud, that you're going to use and create your account over there.
So you have to. Choose. All right. I'm going to do storage with S3 and I'm going to do a CDN with S3 and you're activating those different things. And anybody who's been in the cloud architecture space or world, what can be quite frightening or even if you haven't been is when you have this. $5 a month, bill that you're getting over and over again.
And then all of a sudden you get a $350 bill, or if you're a host, you have a $10,000 bill every month. And all of a sudden you get a $25,000. This is real world. Like I'm not making these numbers up. This happens. Okay. And it's because you can. Turn the wrong button on turn, the wrong thing on set the wrong configuration.
And all of a sudden you're getting charged for things you didn't even realize that you were getting charged for. So there's a learning curve and a gap where people's whole jobs. Yeah. And enterprise companies are to watch the data, watch the numbers, make sure that there's not these overages taking place.
And making sure that things are configured properly so that you don't get one of those huge bills. And there's not a lot of say, fail safes in place for somebody like a, an S3, because they want you to have those expenses right there. They're like, yeah, here's all the options we give you a ton of different things.
You accidentally turn the wrong thing on. Now, your bills, a couple hundred more dollars a month than what you had. So we're trying to eliminate that as well, where it's just, you've got your plans. You don't have to go in and set up the account stuff. If you already know how to do that as an a developer or someone, who's an agency owner, you've gone out, you already know how to set up this cloud stuff, but you know what I'm talking about, infinite uploads is right in the pocket price point wise.
With these other solutions. Our prices are pretty, even if, but you have to obviously know the comparison point, is S3 storage plus delivery. And then once you at scale, our pricing is actually Better than an S3. So like if you get up to a terabyte of data than our prices are actually lower on that side.
Yeah. So I don't know if I actually answered the question. No, it
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:14] was fine. No, it was good. Actually, we started out with just, what's your stack and that was covered right early on. So that's good. And it brings up the subject to pricing because the, some important distinctions, uh, between infinite uploads and other, Competitive plugins.
You, you just got a real simple take on this. It's just storage. You've got one account. That account, is on limited, in a sense, you can connect on limited websites. The only differentiator here is that, if you over, if you overuse, if you go beyond 20 gigabytes, say then you're into another pricing tier.
And then if you go beyond 50 gigabytes, you're into a different one. So that's it. The pricing. Dead simple. You can go and find [email protected] forward slash pricing. As of this moment, we're starting at $9 a month for up to 20 gigabytes of storage and CDN. You can upload as much as you like that you can presumably download as much as you like so long as you stay within that constraint.
The the question that I've got around the process, if, if, if it's tied to 20 gigabytes of storage and 20 gigabytes of CDN bandwidth if one of those sort of straight over slightly, how do we, how does that adjust? Did you get some kind of email saying, look, you're approaching the limit.
Let's think about upgrading you or do you automatically put them onto the next tier? Should they stray into the next tiers territory?
Josh Dailey: [00:41:45] Yeah. So if you will, on the pricing page from a communications perspective, there's all this information is just below the pricing table, but, and how we address overages.
But the reason we don't roll people up into the next tier automatically is because one. You may, it may be more cost beneficial for you to just pay for a little bit of bandwidth overage than it is for you to actually roll into the next plan. But what we also did to make it easy for people is if you start rolling over, let's say you add another really big site and you're.
Site goes over for some reason what we're going to notify you. We send out a whole EV I think it 90% we send an email. But if you didn't get that email and you did end up going over, if you upgrade any time in that 30 day billing cycle we'll honor the pricing of that. You can roll up, even if you've gone over, you can roll up to the next plan and you'll only it will functionally pay for whatever.
Okay. I got it. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:08] Okay. So it's like backwards compatibility, almost deal. You'll cover it. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. The one thing that just occurs to me is if I install it, let's say I'm an agent. I've got an agency and I've got 50 websites or something like that. And I've decided I want to link this up.
So I go link it. And how does that work? I is there some sort of shared environment that I can then? So I log in with my credentials and presumably then I can select the sites that I want, obviously. You know, there is possibility of error there. You could connect the wrong site and suddenly the wrong assets are in the wrong site and so on and so forth.
But also from the point of view of end users. So I've built my site, I've handed it over to my client. Do they, are they able to, in any way, interact with this, are there permissions that they can see? Can they switch this off and on? Can do they even know that this is happening? In most cases you wouldn't even need to tell them.
Right.
Josh Dailey: [00:44:05] They wouldn't know unless. If you were truly handing off, I would say it would be better for you to create their own account for them. If you're going to continue managing it there in our infinite uploads on the site side dashboard you could just go to the sites view of the member dashboard, and then.
It lists every site that's connected to that account. And then you could see the individual use usage for that site by clicking on that site. And it takes you in so that you can actually manage individual sites and disconnect and reconnect. So if, for example, you were managing a site. For somebody, and then you said, ah, I'm ready to move on and I want to disconnect this, but they want to continue using infinite uploads.
You could have them create an account, hit the sync button. And as soon as it takes them over to infinite uploads, it will ask, Hey, this site's already connected over here. Do you want to use that library or not? And then you could say yes, and then you could uh, you'd have to let them. Essentially jump off of the.
The storage from your account, but then it would re-sync back over to their accounts. Well, that's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:36] interesting. So there's a way to like off offload it to the client. Yeah. That's really interesting. It strikes me, this is like a really nice upsell for an agent. That is to say you could easily roll into part of a care plan, uh, we've got you a nice host spits and affordable house, but it'll do that job admirably.
But we, we know that you've built a ton of video content that you want to be available throughout the world at the click of a button, very speedy and so on. We've got, we've got this perfect little package, we'll sell you for $50 a month or whatever, where we will. We will operate a CDN for you.
I notice that if you go onto a higher tier, so starting, I think a $29 a month, you'll also, you also offer the option to have a custom domain. So you could actually almost set this up as a
Josh Dailey: [00:46:25] service. Yes. Yeah. So every site. At the, and so that's the only difference between a business plan and a personal plan is the ability to add custom CDNs URLs to every site.
And that wouldn't just be for one site that's every site gets a custom CDN URL that's connected to your account. And so you just, basically, all you have to do is set up a sub domain. Right URL drop it in paste. It hit save and it automatically converts. So now you're not serving from infinite uploads.
You're serving from media.my site, named.com. I can
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:13] see that being a really useful feature for some agencies that they, that would be a real nice thing to be able to sell on to their clients. For sure.
Josh Dailey: [00:47:22] And it's got. Obvious SEO benefits if you're really into that kind of stuff.
Because now the URLs are all linking back to your. Or are at least masked to link back to your site. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:37] Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. Okay. So I think we've probably, we probably used up the available time. But there's probably something I missed along the way. Cause I always do, if you can think of that, then go for it.
And if not, then tell us where we can find you. If somebody wants to speak to you directly or email you or get reached out to you on Twitter, go for all of that.
Josh Dailey: [00:48:00] Oh, wow. That is a great question. At the end. What did I miss?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:07] What it does is it takes all the responsibility away from me.
Josh Dailey: [00:48:12] Yeah. I honestly like the more that we go down this, and I don't even know if this is going to be helpful, but like the more that we've worked on this I'm shocked that it hasn't been made available already. This is something that I on. I just believe is it's an it's either needed or not like what I was telling you before.
And I'm excited to be able to benefit some of these organizations that I've worked for years with in this. Or if you've had a. A hosting company that you're really enjoying, especially ones that are running on bare metal servers that have very limited storage available to you. But you're like pushing this, the envelope and trying to scale.
This is the way to do that. And it, it does it's fast, it's efficient, it's it is kind of a game changing type service. And I'm excited to be a part of what I think is a pioneer level of stateless WordPress and where things are headed with that. The people that I've gotten to talk to I think of really the true pioneers are people like , who've been.
Doing headless WordPress and decoupling WordPress for a lot of years already. And just to be in their wings and go, man, this is where things are headed for in terms of performance site optimization, getting. Making the internet faster and better for end users and the usability experience of taking WordPress from 40% market share to the a hundred percent market share that, Matt is dreaming of.
And so I think that's where, I get most excited as is the possibilities. When you start talking about. This technology. It's, it's something super simple when you go into use it, but what's taking place on the backend is we've essentially made stateless WordPress available to the world, to anybody who's ready to go down that path and needs it.
Yeah. And so yeah, for me, I'm Josh daily. You can find me. Josh daily at Josh daily on Twitter's probably the most the best place, to, to get ahold of me. And I think my DMS are open. The at infinite uploads is also on Twitter and Facebook. You can find us there. Infinite uploads.com. As you mentioned, we're on the repository.
The plugin is free connect and unlimited number of sites. We're not going to change that. Because the service is the storage and the bandwidth. It's not the plugin. The plugin is our way of allowing people to connect. So we're gonna continue to make that free. And if you don't ever connect a site, you got a nice disk utility.
So you can see what's on there and you can try it out and just get a feel for it that way. And then also, Yeah. If you're interested in the other stuff that I do, I'm CMO at Aspen Grove studios and divvy space. So I'm in the niche theme, builder space as well, and dabbling there, but have a affinity towards the cloud storage space.
I really, you things that, that I feel like are essential for almost any. Site, is, is going to be, how is that content being delivered? And yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:15] Okay. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the podcast and talking to us, infinite uploads, go check it out and leave some comments.
Let us know what you think. If you've got any questions you could reach out to Josh directly and all the ways that you just mentioned. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Josh.
Josh Dailey: [00:52:32] Yes. Thank you for having me. And as always, I am. Honored to be in the presence of greatness.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:41] We aren't going to choke. I'm going to press stop.
Thank you so much, Josh. I hope that you enjoyed that. Very nice chatting to Josh daily. I was lucky enough to meet him in WordCamp Europe a few years ago. And so it was really nice catching up with him for this podcast episode and learning all about the new infinite uploads plugin that he has.
Co-founded if you're interested to know more, you can head over to their website. Links are in the show notes. And also if you feel you want to make some comments about it, you can do that either on the WP Builds.com website, or you could go to the Facebook group either way, search for episode number 233 and make your comment there.
The WP build's podcast was brought to you today by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split test in record time, then you AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything.
And the best part is it works with element or beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. So check it out and get a free [email protected]. As is the case every week, we'll be back next week for a podcast episode, because this was an interview next week. It will be a chat with David Wamsley about something from the alphabet, something to do with the a to Z of WordPress.
Also, we'll be back. As I said, at the top of the show, the, this weekend WordPress show 2:00 PM UK time. Paul Lacey and I chatting with some notable WordPress guests about the WordPress news. Subscribe [email protected] forward slash subscribe. So you don't miss anything, but I'm done for now. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music.
I'll say, I'll see you soon. Have a good week. Stay safe. Bye-bye for now.
