Connecting your own cloud storage (S3 bucket)

If your content already lives in an Amazon S3 bucket — or any S3-compatible storage — you can connect it and import straight from there, instead of downloading everything and uploading it again.

Connecting a bucket

1. Go to your site's cloud storage settings.
2. Click Add bucket.
3. Choose where the bucket is: Amazon S3, another S3-compatible service, or a bucket Paysite provides.
4. Enter the details — bucket name, region (for example us-east-1), your access key and secret key, and an endpoint if your provider needs one.
5. Click Test connection, then save.

Each bucket shows its state — Connected, Not tested, or Disabled — so you can see at a glance whether it's working.

Importing from a connected bucket

Once a bucket is connected, you can browse it from the import panel and bring files in:

• Browse folders, or start at the bucket root.
• Search within a folder or across all folders.
• Select several files at once — shift-click to select a range.

Imported files are processed exactly like a normal upload: encoding, thumbnails, and preview clips all run as usual.

Two ways files are handled

How your files get to the encoder depends on where the bucket lives:

• Encodes in place — for a bucket on our own storage, the encoder reads the files where they are. Nothing is copied, so imports start faster.
• Copied before encoding — for an AWS bucket or one on another account, the encoder can't read it directly, so each file is copied into your site's storage first. This works fine, it just adds a copying step.

Each bucket is tagged with which mode it uses, so you know what to expect.

Sharing a bucket across sites

If you run more than one site, a bucket can be shared:

• Grant access to a site — choose which of your sites may import from it.
• Lock a site to a folder — point a site at one folder in the bucket instead of the whole thing, which keeps each site's content separate.

Buckets added by a site with its own keys are private to that site. Buckets set up for you by Paysite are marked as such — contact support to change those rather than editing them yourself.

Good to know

• Use credentials with access to just the bucket you're connecting, not your whole AWS account.
• If a connection stops working, re-run Test connection — rotated or expired keys are the usual cause.
• Prefer importing from Dropbox, Google Drive, ManyVids, or ModelCentro instead? See Importing content from Dropbox, Google Drive, ManyVids, and ModelCentro.