Larger MODX Cloud plans come with more storage and features. Most sites fit easily within the entry-level plan for storage, even with extended backup schedules. However, if you manage or build more than a few sites, you probably need more storage for your plan.
The following areas are what make up your storage usage in MODX Cloud. The last paragraph of each section deals with strategies you can use to minimize storage usage to fit within your chosen plan limits.
Storage Usage Balance
Account Total Usage
You can find out how much storage your account is using in the MODX Cloud dashboard using the following steps:
- Click on the down arrow to the right of your account name at the top right of the dashboard
- Select Account in the dropdown menu
- From the right hand side of the Account view you'll see a box with your plan name and the amount of storage used
If your account is using more storage than your plan allows, you'll see that reflected in that Account Summary box as shown below. You will see a link that directs you to this document.
Backups and Snapshot Storage
You can find the storage used by your Backups and Snapshots at the top of each corresponding view as shown below.
Managing Your Storage
Sites
Each site you have in MODX Cloud takes up disk space in your www/ (web root) directory. The storage includes anything installed inside of your web root directory, including the assets you upload there, plus your database associated with your site.
To minimize storage usage for sites, only upload files that will be used for your site. If you use video, definitely do everything you can to host video on a dedicated streaming platform, purpose-built for that task like Youtube, Wistia or Vimeo. If you use Youtube, you may also get a bit of an SEO bump, too. Videos are very large and consume a lot of disk space.
If you have a very image-heavy site, it may also make sense to store images on something like S3, and to use a CDN to serve them. You can create an Amazon S3 media source to reference images in your MODX Revolution sites without having the images take up local storage.
Storage Saving Tip: If you are using MODX Cloud to develop sites, you might consider taking a Snapshot of any pure development site and shutting down the live instance if you're not going to use it for an extended period of time. Alway test creating a new instance from Snapshots before removing development sites. Trust, but verify!
Backups
Every site in MODX Cloud, be it a MODX instance or a Flex Cloud instance, gets backed up to redundant offsite storage in IBM Cloud Object Storage. Backups are Zip archives of the web directory and a complete export (sqldump) of the database, so they can be moved to other Cloud instances or servers as needed.
For larger sites with lots of images for instance, backups can consume a significant amount of space. You set the backup retention policy on the Backups tab of each Cloud instance; by default, every instance is backed up for 7 days. Some guidelines and adjustments you might wish to consider to minimize Backup usage:
- For experimental or non-critical sites, reduce the backup frequency as low as you're comfortable. We require a minimum of one backup - they cannot be turned off.
- For important sites, especially ones that are updated frequently, you may want to have an even longer backup frequency. In MODX Cloud you can adjust backup schedules from a low as 1 day to as long as 30 days. This will get you nightly backups done, approximately at midnight local to the server location.
Storage Saving Tip: To save storage space, make sure there are no old backups from years or months past that you no longer need - just delete them to save a lot of storage space. Also lower the backup retention frequency on non-critical or transient projects.
A Note on Migration Backups
If you move a site from one server in MODX Cloud to another one using the Dashboard tool, it takes a Backup of the site being moved before initiating the migration. Migration backups are not currently automatically deleted. Once you are happy with the site on the new server, you can manually delete the migration backups to save Vault storage.
Snapshots
Site Snapshots are exclusive to MODX Revolution projects and are very useful for taking point-in-time copies of a site. You can then spin up copies of those sites, share the Snapshots to other MODX Cloud accounts and more. Snapshots are like extended backups of MODX Revolution with the auto-magical ability to migrate some are all of one project into another one. Snapshots are tremendously useful for staging to production workflows.
Storage Saving Tip: If you have completed a project or launched a new development phase, and no longer need the Snapshots used to deploy them, consider deleting them from your account to save storage space.
Archive Clouds
Archive Clouds are like Backups in that they store a version of your site. However, the function as paused instances that can be restarted on demand.
Archive Clouds maintain all the configuration settings, web rules, domain records, DNS, and Add-ons, ready for reprovisioning without going through all the configuration steps. This makes them ideal to use for infrequently referenced sites as they only maintain a single/last backup (and any manual backups) compared to normal sites which accumulate multiple nightly backups.
Account Storage Upgrade
While it's good to maintain your storage, it's not always possible or sensible to reduce beyond a certain level of storage for your sites and the number of Backups and Snapshots you would like to retain in your account. As such, it's possible to purchase additional storage for your plan.
Account Storage Upgrades are available on the Pro Plan and Above. Basic Plan customers will need to upgrade to the Pro Plan in order to have additional storage.
To purchase additional storage:
- Click on the down arrow to the right of your account name at the top right of the dashboard
- Select Account in the dropdown menu
- At the top of the Account overview you should see a tab called Add-ons. Click that to view Account Add-ons
- You will see at the top the list of the available Vault Storage upgrades as shown in the image below
- Select the amount of storage you need and click Update Vault Storage to proceed to the checkout to complete the add-on purchase