Hello everyone. I am embarked upon a project to “put all of the family’s personal media on the internet” at the request of my dear old nonagenarian dad. We are a family spread around the world.
Plex seems great, and I like the _idea _of Plex Cloud Server, but I don’t want to live with its three (imho) major limitations - no extensions (channels), no support for media encryption, no control of fundamental server parameters (of which the first two are examples).
So I’ve been wondering about running a standard Plex server on some third party cloud server - Amazon AWS, Azure, etc.
Has anyone else done this? What were your costs and experiences?
The thread is a good read and a goldmine of advice if you want to start such a project.
Costs depend heavily on your server provider, but expect something like 10€//month for the server and approximately the same amount for Gsuite (Google drive for business) for unlimited storage. I run one myself and I have not regretted it up to now. For 10 €/ you already get a server which is able to handle (several) transcodes, in my case it is approx. 3 concurrent transcodes, but this depends on your server and media. Encryption does work and you have the full control of what’s happening.
You do need some linux skills and/or are willing to aquire them. Administrating your own server can be demanding, because you are responsible for what happens to it. But this is also managable. If you have questions, if advise you to ask in the VPS thread.
Costs depend heavily on your server provider, but expect something like 10€/$/month for the server and approximately the same amount for Gsuite (Google drive for business) for unlimited storage. I run one myself and I have not regretted it up to now. For 10 €/$ you already get a server which is able to handle (several) transcodes, in my case it is approx. 3 concurrent transcodes, but this depends on your server and media. Encryption does work and you have the full control of what’s happening.
You do need some linux skills and/or are willing to aquire them. Administrating your own server can be demanding, because you are responsible for what happens to it. But this is also managable. If you have questions, if advise you to ask in the VPS thread.
Wow, what a thread that is, thanks again. I don’t know how I missed it (though I’ve read so many since first discovering Plex a week ago…).
One thing I’m curious about though. Several people mention file by file encryption on their (cloud hosted) media libraries. Is there any way to do that where the Plex client is given the decryption key? So that the data is unintelligible until it reaches the playing device (irrespective of the presence or absence of a VPS)?
Of course I’m already fairly sure that’s not possible, as I’d have seen some evidence of it when messing about these last few days.
