Can I have persistent sandboxes that never expire?

Persistent sandboxes — sandboxes that never expire — are an available option for most of our subscription plans.

WP Sandbox is designed to quickly create WordPress sandbox sites for as many people as possible. The service is not designed to be a permanent, dedicated website host. There are many features you can find at your normal hosting provider that WP Sandbox does not and probably will never offer.

If you need just one single staging site for your website, WP Sandbox isn’t a good fit for your needs. Often, traditional dedicated WordPress host plans can provide you a single staging site for your site, free of charge, at just the click of a button.

There are many WordPress plugins that help you set up a staging or dev site for your WordPress site. You should explore those options instead of using a service like WP Sandbox (if for no other reason than those sites do not expire).

If you need to host several WordPress websites for your agency clients, then WP Sandbox won’t be a great fit for your needs. A VPS account is usually a better choice for permanently hosting WordPress websites for your agency customers.

In general, most of our customers who are using WP Sandbox for customer demos, customer support, QA, user acceptance testing, plugin or theme development, or for hosting e-learning content find that it’s advantageous for their sandboxes to expire, for several reasons.

First, sandboxes that expire allow each sandbox to be reused by other visitors. Similar to the concept of “turning tables” in a restaurant, you get more value for your money the more people can use each of your allotted sandbox sites.

Next, expiring customer demo sandboxes encourage your visitors to stay focused and make their purchase decision more quickly.

Next, expiring e-course content sandboxes are valuable for encouraging your students to stay on track and finish the course before the sandbox disappears.

Lastly, persistent sandbox sites are useful for only a narrow set of circumstances. We find that our customers with persistent sandboxes are using them to host training content, knowledge base content, and ongoing internal demos having approval stages leading up to a major feature launch. In these cases, they want to continually build on their earlier site iterations over time — without worrying about sandbox expiration.