Pydio Cells

Pydio Cells is the modern, open-source content collaboration platform built by the Pydio team, designed as a self-hosted alternative to Box, Dropbox Business, SharePoint, and similar enterprise file-sharing services. With over 2,200 GitHub stars and active development on a Go-based microservice backend, Cells delivers the speed and scalability of commercial offerings while keeping every document, share link, and audit log under your own control. It bundles secure file storage, team workspaces with role-based access, in-browser preview for dozens of file types, WebDAV and S3-compatible access for desktop and mobile clients, and granular sharing controls suitable for both internal collaboration and external client delivery.

Common Use Cases

Small and mid-sized teams deploy Pydio Cells as their private collaboration hub, replacing per-user SaaS subscriptions with a single VPS-hosted instance that grows with the team. Agencies and consultancies use it to deliver project files to clients through password-protected share links with download limits and automatic expiry — no third-party platform sees the content. Healthcare, legal, and compliance-sensitive organisations choose Cells specifically because every document, share link, and access event stays on infrastructure they control, with audit logs that satisfy strict regulatory requirements. Distributed engineering teams leverage WebDAV mounts and the S3-compatible API to integrate Cells with their existing tooling, treating it as both a collaboration UI and a programmatic content store.

Workspaces, Sharing, and Access Control

Pydio Cells' core abstraction is the workspace — a folder with its own permissions, members, and activity feed. Workspaces can be private to one user, shared with a team, or exposed to specific external collaborators with custom permission levels. Files within a workspace inherit those permissions but can be overridden per file or folder. Share links generated from any file or folder support password protection, download counts, expiry dates, and read-versus-write modes. Combined with role-based access control across users and groups, Cells supports complex organisational hierarchies without requiring custom integration work.

Key Features

• Team workspaces with role-based access control and per-user folder permissions
• Public share links with passwords, expiry dates, and download limits
• In-browser preview for PDF, images, video, audio, and Microsoft Office documents
• WebDAV mount support for desktop file managers and sync clients
• S3-compatible API for programmatic access and integration
• Native iOS and Android apps for mobile access
• Activity feeds per workspace with full audit log
• Full-text search across document content
• External authentication via LDAP, SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect
• Versioning, locking, and recycle bin for safe collaborative editing

Why deploy Pydio Cells on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Pydio Cells on a Hostinger VPS gives you a private content collaboration platform with dedicated CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and storage — essential for keeping document previews snappy, large file transfers fast, and concurrent team activity responsive. The Go-based backend uses resources efficiently, leaving room for additional services running alongside on the same VPS. Persistent named volumes for application config, MariaDB state, and uploaded files ensure your workspaces, share links, user accounts, and document content survive container updates and host restarts, so years of accumulated collaboration history are never lost. Full root access lets you tune the MariaDB instance, integrate with external authentication providers, configure backup pipelines, and wire Cells into your existing infrastructure — turning a generic VPS into a complete owner-controlled alternative to commercial enterprise file sharing.