Plex announced today that it will be shutting down its Plex Cloud service as of Nov. 30, 2018, following a struggle with performance and user experience issues with the service.
Although Plex has traditionally been focused on allowing users to access media files from their own local computers or network attached storage (NAS) devices, the company introduced Plex Cloud two years ago to provide users with the option to host their media content on cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive. After a number of technical challenges with the service, Plex announced last February that they were “pausing new server creation to evaluate the long term plan for the service,” allowing existing users to continue using Plex Cloud while preventing any new users from signing up fro the service.
With today’s announcement, the company has made it clear that they’ve been unable to find “a solution capable of delivering a truly first class Plex experience to Plex Cloud users at a reasonable cost” and have therefore had to make the difficult decision to shut down the service entirely. While the shutdown of the service naturally won’t affect media stored in third-party cloud services, users who wish to continue using Plex will need to set up their own Plex Media Server and migrate their content over to it manually.