Frequently Asked Questions
You’ve probably got questions. Let’s dive in.
WP Sandbox is not accepting new registrations. Current customers, please sign in here.
WP Sandbox is currently not accepting new registrations. Current customers can sign in here.
The sandbox limit is the number of sandboxes active at any one time.
You may create as many sandboxes in a month as you like, so long as the total number in existence at any one time stays within the max of your chosen plan.
Once the limit is reached, a simple “Sandbox limit reached” message is shown for new requests.
You can manually delete sandboxes, or let them naturally expire on their own. When sandboxes are deleted or have expired, you can then re-use that sandbox again and again, as long as the total number in existence at any one time stays within the max allowed of your chosen plan.
When a sandbox expires, all of its data — including all aspects of its database, wordpress settings, plugins, uploads, media and user accounts — are deleted.
Please be sure to back up anything you wish to keep before you delete a sandbox (and before it expires) because there is no way for us to retrieve sandbox contents.
Addresses for deleted sandboxes are immediately made available to be reused for future sandboxes.
Yes, sandboxes that never expire are an available option with some of our subscription plans. We call these persistent sandboxes.
By default, our sandboxes are set to expire. Some plans have the option to choose “Never Expire” for a particular sandbox.
Read more about why our sandboxes default to expire →
Should we allow persistent sandboxes to more of our customer plan levels? Let us know your thoughts on the use case you have in mind for a non-expiring sandbox. We’re always here to listen to your ideas.
Yes, you may SSH into any of your sandboxes. See our knowledge base article to see how to enable SSH for each of your sandboxes.
We have made a few shortcodes available for use in your custom dashboard welcome message, including the admin username, sandbox expiration time, and sandbox address (URL).
If you can think of other shortcodes that would be useful for your sandbox, please let us know!
Read more about our WordPress dashboard shortcodes here.
No, WP Sandbox does not prevent sandbox users from adding or removing plugins, but you can certainly take steps of your own to prevent this.
With a normal sandbox, there is a remote possibility a sandbox user could download your plugin file(s) from the demo sandbox.
Usually, commercial plugin authors find that implementing a license key system is more than sufficient to discourage unauthorized use.
If the unlikely chance of someone downloading your plugin or theme files from your demo sandbox is a legitimate concern for you, you can prevent this by using the Admin Menu Editor plugin to disable the plugins menu item and plugin functionality in your sandboxes.
You can read more about this, here.
Yes, by default, sandbox users can modify, add, or remove plugin and theme files.
WP Sandbox does not prevent sandbox users from adding, modifying, or removing plugins or theme files, but you can certainly take steps of your own to control this.
As the sandbox owner, you can control access to certain normal WordPress capabilities by using the Admin Menu Editor plugin to disable the menu items and features in your WordPress sandboxes that you’d rather your demo customers not have access to.
You can read more about this, here.
Native email sending is disabled on our sandbox sites.
You may, of course, install mail sending and mail logging plugins that use a third-party service to send emails.
Usually, a simple mail logger plugin installed into your sandbox will suffice to capture the text of emails for debugging purposes.
Why don’t we allow emails to be sent from the sandboxes? Because scammers & spammers ruin everything. This is why we can’t have nice things. Sigh.
The ability to use custom domains is coming soon. See our Feature matrix for which plans will have the option for custom domain support.
WP Sandbox requires considerable resources to host, manage and monitor. Because of the nature of the service, and the ease by which a free trial sandbox can be abused, we do not offer free trials.
WP Sandbox is risk free, and offers a No-Hassle, 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. If you’re not satisfied with our service for any reason, you may cancel at any time.