But our personal media server was always designed and intended for users to host themselves at home for personal user, not in a shared hosting environment. Doing the latter could have unexpected consequences if other people also using the same hosting provider choose to take actions that violate a Terms of Service agreement, which is one reason it’s not something we recommend.
Technically, what is the difference between 10 people hosting PMS in a shared hosted env and self hosting at home? If those 10 people violate the Terms of Service, how different it is between shared hosting and self-hosting? Could you elaborate on the “unexpected consequences” to educate the rest of us?
But our personal media server was always designed and intended for users to host themselves at home for personal user, not in a shared hosting environment.
Reading between the lines, Plex Inc. is clearly planning to ban every hosting provider, and probably self hosting, hiding behind misleading technical arguments.
It is smoke and mirrors at best, the root cause is clearly not technical but on the business side…
Your cloudflare proxy affects your incomming connections from Plex clients. But your plex server will still phone home to check it’s auth details from your Hetzner servers IP address.
The people selling a service and making money will just VPN their whole traffic from their Hetzner servers if Plex go ahead with this, or simply migrate to a new provider.
This isn’t going to hurt the people that they’re supposedly trying to target.
Great! Since there is nothing else I can do then, I will follow the advice given in the mail and I will move my pms installation to the only place I am personally able to move it to: the trash bin.
Will we be able to contact support to get whitelisted? Surely you will be able to see the amount of shares in our accounts and make decisions based on that.
If not, will we get a refund for our lifetime Plex Pass or will you force us to go to court over this? Because this is not legal in many countries, you’re arbitrarily revoking access to your software for paying users based on their IP location. This limitation was not mentioned in your ToS when buying the lifetime Plex Pass (in fact it isn’t mentioned in the ToS as of this writing, if I didn’t miss something), therefore you cannot enforce it globally at your convenience. There are laws. Sell your product to US customers only if you only care about US laws. But surely you know this and will provide a reasonable solution for customers who do not abuse Plex for monetary gain.
Hetzner is just a Hosting Provider.
You buy a server and then you can do what you want. Legal or Not Legal files… Not Hetzner Business in the first place.
Cancelled Plex Pass and submitted feedback indicating the cancellation was due to this. Banning legitimate users who do not have the home internet speeds available to them is BS.
This is honestly insane. I run a private Plex server for myself and my family and I don’t have the bandwidth required from my crappy home connection for it to work for family members.
Why wouldn’t you just limit the number of users if large pirated shares are a concern?
Random person on the internet thinks of a very obvious and extremely simple way to quash the alleged and cited reason for Plex’s “not-lightly taken” decision, a way which Plex management apparently could not come up with while they were looking at what they could do to stop the issue they cited.
Yes, I have received this communication today sept 15th, and I am very annoyed.
I have a Plex subscription, I do not share my personal sever info with anyone, and I have a personal IP which have never violated their ToS.
I can’t stand that for my legitimate use they can tell me “To avoid these issues, we suggest that you consider alternative hosting options, including hosting it from your home.”
I don’t have a low-price VPS but a bare metal server hosting many services (mail server, matrix server, teslamate and many others).
It’s simply impossible and unacceptable to have to shift hosting solution because there have been “violations” by users: Plex can identify and ban such users, they can’t punish legitimate users!
Yes but, the public URL inside plex config is to “publish” on plex website
actually plex run trought plex.direct domain,
but you can also send traffic to custom domain, for me plex just going to ban hetzner from the “proxy” (limited connection) and domain plex.direct ^^
Your server won’t be able to reach out to plex servers to authenticate itself. Even if you’re using a proxy for incoming connections, this will still affect you.
What is the reason for Plex to block these hosting providers?? I don´t get it. Have they gotten mail from lawyers and now have to take action? I cannot believe they´ve done it for the goodwill - to save the world and fight against piracy…
plex cannot completly block incomming connection to their service.
Im really thinking they just stop routing plex.direct domain (server gonna appears to be down)
But if you setup custom URL for me you can bypass this restriction ^^
I will switch to Jellyfin. That is the easiest and safest solution. I will pursue a refund on plex pass. If necessary, I will file a dispute with my credit card.
Migrating to another server is not a reasonable option. No other provider has comparable storage prices. Hetzner’s sx64 is too good. It’s not possible for me to set up a home server due to my living situation.
We should have known better than subjecting ourselves to vendor lock-in, using closed source software when there are equally good open source alternatives. This company has made it clear today they have zero interest in customer service. Why would I continue a relationship with a company that has zero respect for me and refuses to provide the services that I paid for? Even if I find a solution for this now, they will find another excuse to screw me over in the future. Plex has made it clear that they cannot be trusted.
As with so many others here I’ve found this disappointing, I live in a flatshare and don’t have the space or internet connection to host locally and even if i found another online host that i could afford, there’s no surety that this wouldn’t happen again.
I’ve cancelled my plex pass and will look at using Jellyfin or Emby moving forward
