Frequently asked questions
Here you will find answers to the questions we most commonly hear from people who are wondering if Umbraco Cloud is the right fit for their project. The answers you will find here are of a more technical nature and are directed at developers.
If you are interested in more general information about the product, you should visit the FAQ on our website.
General
Can I try before I pay?
Yes, you can take a free trial of Umbraco Cloud and test it for 14 days with no obligation to buy.
Is it a special version of Umbraco that’s used?
No. It's the same as the latest version of Umbraco that you can download.
Can I run my high-traffic site on Umbraco Cloud?
Currently, we have benchmarked a "well-built" site with approximately 50,000 unique visitors per day (~1.5 million per month) that performs well. For business-critical, high-traffic sites, we recommend that you look into Umbraco Cloud Professional and Enterprise possibly in combination with a dedicated server.
Can my site auto-scale or use dedicated worker resources?
Your site can't currently auto-scale, but it is something we’re investigating as a future feature. We do offer dedicated worker resources. Reach out to us if you want to know more.
Can I set up a load-balanced Umbraco Cloud site?
Not currently.
Can I move my site from Umbraco Cloud?
Yes, you can. Umbraco Cloud uses the same Umbraco version that you can download and use on your own. If you decide that Umbraco Cloud is not right for you, you can take some actions alone. You can clone your site, restore your data locally, and delete your Umbraco Cloud project. We will be sad to see you go. But we understand there are some requirements we might be unable to fulfill. So we support and encourage you to choose the best solution for your specific site needs.
Can I move my existing site to Umbraco Cloud?
Umbraco Cloud is best when used as the base for a new project. There is a specific way of working with Umbraco and Umbraco Cloud in order to take full advantage of the service. That’s not to say you can’t migrate an existing site, only that some changes may be required in order for your site to fully work with Umbraco Cloud. For more information read our guide to moving an existing site.
What languages are available for content localization on Umbraco Cloud?
Umbraco Cloud relies on the underlying Azure infrastructure for content localization in Umbraco CMS. Find the available languages in the dropdown below.
Technology
On what kind of server environment does my Cloud site run?
All available Umbraco Cloud plans are utilizing P1V3 Azure App Service Plans as their underlying infrastructure. A P1V3 Azure App Service Plan offers in total
2 CPU Cores
8GB of RAM
250 GB Disk space
1,920 TCP connections
How many resources do I have available for my website?
To see quotas for the different plans on Umbraco Cloud see Umbraco Cloud Plans
We also have a limitation for hostnames on the different plans on Umbraco Cloud. You can see how many hostnames you can have on our pricing list.
In our experience, there are only a few Cloud sites that have experienced these limitations and we're happy to work with people who have sites affected by these limitations.
You can monitor your site's usage and performance via the 'Usage' and the 'Availability & Performance' pages on Umbraco Cloud. Inside the 'Usage' page you can view Bandwidth consumption and inside the 'Availability & Performance' page you can monitor CPU and Memory usage.
If you have questions about how many resources your site is using, then please reach out to our friendly support team.
Can I use Cloudflare in front of my Umbraco Cloud site
Yes, you can. Please note that Umbraco Cloud also uses Cloudflare for DNS, so you need to enroll your hostname as 'DNS Only' with a CNAME pointing to dns.umbraco.io. Once you can see the hostname is marked with 'Protected' under the Project / Hostname subpage you can turn on 'Proxying' for the hostname in your Cloudflare account if you need to use specific Cloudflare features like Page Rules.
Generally, we recommend that you keep your DNS entry set to 'DNS Only' in your own Cloudflare account. This lets Umbraco Cloud handle the automatic Transport Layer Security (TLS)/HTTPS certificates for the hostnames you point to your Umbraco Cloud project. Check with our support team, via chat or using support@umbraco.com, before bringing in your own Cloudflare setup.
Does Cloudflare add any additional HTTP request headers?
HTTP headers are bits of information that are passed along within every communication between (web) servers and (browser) clients. All HTTP requests to custom hostnames on Umbraco Cloud pass through Cloudflare.
HTTP requests headers can be useful for for example multilingual purposes to redirect users of certain languages to a specific URL. Here, the collection of visitor location headers below will be helpful. The values for these location headers are derived from the visitor's IP address.
cf-ipcity: The visitor's citycf-ipcontinent: The visitor's continentcf-iplatitude: The visitor's latitudecf-iplongitude: The visitor's longitudeuc-ipcountry: The visitor’s country.uc-ipcountryheader is a carbon copy of cf-ipcountry.
Note, the HTTP requests headers are available on all custom hostnames created through Umbraco Cloud. But not the default hostname for the Umbraco Cloud project such as project.euwest01.umbraco.io.
Which Umbraco versions are available on Umbraco Cloud?
All supported versions of Umbraco CMS are available on Umbraco Cloud. See the Long-term Support & End-of-Life page for more information.
Upgrades
When does Umbraco get upgraded in the different projects?
We upgrade when we're confident the release is solid.
How do Automated Upgrades work?
We automatically upgrade Cloud projects to the latest patch and minor version of Umbraco CMS, Umbraco Forms, and Umbraco Deploy. When we make a new patch version, we first run it through our test suite, then test it on 10 test sites. When all that passes, we roll out the upgrade in batches of 100 to customer accounts.
My project didn't receive the auto-upgrade. Why?
When we roll out auto-upgrades to Umbraco Cloud projects the first thing that happens is a check of all environments on a project. This check will verify whether the environments are responding and do not return an HTTP status error. If the auto-upgrader encounters HTTP status errors on any of the environments during this check, the upgrade process is aborted. Your project will not receive the upgrade should this happen.
Another reason why your project wasn't auto-upgraded could be, that it failed the test we perform after applying the auto-upgrade. This test compares the state of an environment from before the upgrade with the state of the same environment after the upgrade. If they don't match, we take the appropriate measures to rollback the environment to its previous state. Then the upgrade is aborted of any remaining environments.
Other reasons why you didn't receive the auto-upgrade:
If you are doing a deployment at the time we tried to run the auto-upgrader on your project.
If your environments aren't running the same minor version. For example, if you are in the middle of upgrading to a new minor version, and one environment is running 7.6.x while another environment on the same project is running 7.7.x.
You can find all the steps of the auto-upgrade process outlined in the Upgrades article.
Does leaving pending commits (dev to live) derail the upgrade process?
Pending commits won't stop the auto-upgrade.
Is it OK to do manual updates? For example, if a project on 9.4.3 is updated locally to 9.4.4, can we commit back to dev?
Yes, that’s fine. In some cases, you may want to upgrade sooner than the scheduled service upgrade or you may have a site we couldn't upgrade automatically for one reason or another.
Do note, however, that you will need to step through the upgrade installer manually on each environment, including live. Our automated upgrader makes sure that visitors to your live site will not be prompted to log in to the upgrade installer.
I have customized files that Umbraco ships with, will they be overwritten during upgrades?
You will have to assume that every time we upgrade your site, any file that comes with Umbraco by default will be overwritten. Generally, we only overwrite the files that have been changed in the newest release but there is no guarantee for that. So if you (for example) have customized the login page then you can assume it will be reverted on each upgrade.
Testing
Are we allowed to perform penetration tests on our Umbraco Cloud site?
Yes, we're happy for people to do penetration testing on the sites they have built on Cloud. We do ask you to please tell us about these tests beforehand so our support staff knows to look out for possible strange things happening on your site.
We are also happy to receive any test results you receive so that we can improve security in Umbraco where necessary.
Please contact us using the chat button at the bottom right corner of the Umbraco Cloud portal.
Are we allowed to do (D)DOS testing on our Umbraco Cloud site?
It is strictly forbidden to attempt to do a denial of service attack on your Cloud sites.
Can Umbraco Cloud support my website?
The ability of Umbraco Cloud to support your website depends on different factors. This includes the number of visitors and the media storage your site requires.
These details alone do not fully determine whether Umbraco Cloud is the right fit for your needs.
Each website can have different performance requirements based on how it is built and configured. We recommend running a load test, to learn whether Umbraco Cloud can handle your specific website. This test simulates real-world traffic and can help you understand the computation power and resources your website will require.
There are user-friendly tools available, such as LoadNinja, to help you conduct these simulations. This will give you a clearer picture of whether Umbraco Cloud can support your website effectively.
Are we allowed to do load testing on our Umbraco Cloud site?
We would like to talk to you beforehand about your test plan for a load test on your Cloud site.
Please contact us using the chat button at the bottom right corner of the Umbraco Cloud portal.
Security and encryption
Haven't found an answer to your question? Many security-related questions are answered in the Security section of the documentation.
Does Umbraco Cloud support TLS / HTTPS?
Yes, in fact, Umbraco Cloud provides automatic Transport Layer Security (TLS)/HTTPS certificates for all hostnames added to an Umbraco Cloud Project's environment. Umbraco Cloud will automatically renew the certificates, which are issued by Cloudflare. By default, the certificates are valid for 90 days and are then automatically renewed for as long as the hostname is active on Umbraco Cloud.
Does Umbraco Cloud support custom certificates?
Yes. Pro and Enterprise Plans can add custom certificates for each of their custom hostnames in order to override the certificates that are provided by Umbraco Cloud by default.
Learn more about how to use your own certificates in the Custom certificates article.
Does Umbraco Cloud support HTTP/2?
By default, Umbraco Cloud supports HTTP/2.
There's an ARRAffinity cookie on my site which is not sent over HTTPS, is this a security risk?
No this is not a security risk. This cookie is set by the load balancer (LB) and is only used by the LB to track which server your site is on. ARRAffinity cookie is a built-in feature of Azure App Service and is only useful when your website is being scaled to multiple servers. In Umbraco Cloud, we cannot scale your site to multiple servers so the cookie is effectively unused.
You can learn much more about this in our Security section.
Can I use wildcard certificates on Umbraco Cloud? How about an EV, DV, or OV certificate?
Yes. You can use any valid certificate on Umbraco Cloud.
I get a warning that "your connection is not private" and the certificate is served for *.umbraco.io
It seems that you didn't set up the bindings for the specific domain where this warning is showing. Check the bindings by going to the site in the portal by going to the "Manage hostnames" section for your site.
How can I control who accesses my backoffice using IP filtering?
Yes. On Cloud, you can add an IP filter of your choosing. There are a few things you need to pay attention to though. Umbraco Deploy will still need to be able to talk to the different environments in your Cloud website and you should still be able to use the site locally.
Learn more about this and how to set it up in our Security section.
Does Umbraco Cloud use Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for databases?
Yes, every site created after May 2nd, 2017 will have TDE enabled by default. For older sites, we can enable this by request.
Building and deploying
Umbraco Cloud creates a SQL/LocalDb database for me, can I use a shared SQL Server for my development team instead?
No, you should not use a shared database for your team. Umbraco Cloud is made so that each team member can safely make any changes they need and then send them to your development environment on Cloud. Another developer can do the same and also send their changes to the dev to test. Once you're happy with all of the changes, each developer can pull down the changes from development and continue working on the next change.
Not only does this promote working in small increments it also prevents two problems:
If you share a database between multiple developers, Umbraco's flexible load balancing automatically kicks in. Without a proper load balancing setup, this means that often you will not see changes another team member has made, potentially overwriting their changes with your own changes.
Our deployment engine (Umbraco Deploy) is not made for this and your local site will quickly get out of sync with the changes both developers are making. Once you push your changes up to your Cloud instance you can expect to see errors and mismatches because changes have not been saved correctly.
Can I use a custom .NET code?
Yes, you can make your Umbraco implementations as you're used to, including custom .NET assemblies.
Umbraco Cloud sites run on IIS 8.5 so most things you can normally do on IIS, you can do on Umbraco Cloud. We don't, however, offer support for custom components that have to be installed on the server itself. If you can ship it in the bin folder, it should generally work on Cloud.
If you have any experience with Azure Web Apps, Cloud works in the same way. So if you can make it run on Azure Web Apps, you can make it run on Umbraco Cloud.
Is it possible to add my own custom DLLs for extending the Umbraco Backoffice?
Yes, an Umbraco Cloud project is similar to a normal Umbraco website where we give you multiple environments and deployment of code and content between these environments. You can run your site locally (via Git) which is the best way to add your own code (templates, cs files, packages, DLLs, and so forth).
Is it possible to add custom tables in addition to the Umbraco Cloud database?
Yes, you can create custom tables in the database. Find the connection strings to the databases on the different environments on the "Connection Details" page found in the "Settings" menu.
Note that custom database tables and data do not replicate automatically across Cloud environments. You might want to use Umbraco Migrations and our PetaPoco data layer to make the deployment of your custom data more automated.
I would love to use Websockets on my site, is this possible?
Yes, it is! Websockets are enabled on all sites.
My deletions are not picked up when deployed to the next environment
When you've deleted something (e.g. content, media, or schema) on one environment, the deletions will not be picked up on the next environment when you deploy.
This is intended behavior.
We will only delete the files and not the database entries, as this could potentially cause you to lose data on your Live/production environment.
You can read much more about these deletions in the Deploying Deletions article.
Package support
Do you support package "x" on Umbraco Cloud?
Umbraco Cloud uses Azure App Service Plans for website hosting services. This is a typical platform used for hosting web applications and it offers all features necessary for running Umbraco websites.
Given that, packages that run in your local development environment, or on other hosting platforms, are likely to also be supported on Umbraco Cloud.
The only potential issue to be aware of is if your package stores custom data in the Umbraco database. Most packages don't do this, either purely adding functionality, or using existing Umbraco services for any data storage they require.
If a package does save data into a custom table within the Umbraco database, it will still operate as expected on Umbraco Cloud. However, unless the package developer has taken additional steps to support this, you won't be able to transfer the saved information between environments.
This may not be important if you don't have a need to do this. For example Umbraco Workflow is typically used in a single environment, either staging or production. Even though it does save custom data, there's no requirement to move it between environments.
In some cases though, you may want to be able to transfer data prepared in a staging environment to production. Or conversely, to restore it into a local development environment for debugging purposes. The package may or may not be built to support this.
If you find you are unable to move information between the environments you should contact the package's developer to ask about plans for support. How a package developer can offer this feature is described in the following section.
How do I make my package support Umbraco Cloud?
As discussed in the section above, most packages will work fine in Umbraco Cloud without any modification.
Some packages save data into custom Umbraco database tables, and if so, it may be useful to be able to transfer that data between environments. If this is the case, then there is an extra step you should take to fully support usage of your package on Umbraco Cloud.
Umbraco Cloud uses the Umbraco Deploy tool to for the purpose of transfer of Umbraco information between environments. This includes Umbraco "schema" (such as document types) as well as "content" (such as content or media).
In order to support custom data transfer between environments, the package or solution developer needs to build an add-on to their package. This extends Umbraco Deploy with a "connector" that details of how the data for the package should be handled.
Specific care needs to be taken when developing the connector if the package stores references to content nodes, media items, or members in Umbraco.
There are two challenges here:
Your package is referring to an integer identifier, for example, a content item with the id
1023. On the next environment that same content item exists but since the content is a bit different there, the id is1039instead. Umbraco Deploy needs to know how to connect the correct identifier.Even if the identifier is correct in both environments your package might rely on the other item (the one you're referring to) to exist in the next environment. So if the content item you're referring to (
1023) does not exist in the environment where you're pushing the content you might see errors in your package.
Open-source examples of connectors can be found in the Umbraco Commerce Deploy and the Umbraco Deploy Contrib projects.
Umbraco Deploy Contrib is included in all Cloud sites and we keep it upgraded to the latest version for every site.
We have a dedicated documentation page discussing the process of extending Umbraco Deploy via the creation of connectors for custom data.
The code in these projects should also help you understand the steps and how to build something similar for your own package.
If you need help with this, don't hesitate to reach out to us and we'll be happy to give you some tips.
Regions
Can I choose which region my projects run in?
Yes, you can choose between West Europe, East US, South UK, and East Australia regions.
Can I move my existing project created on Cloud in the EU region to other regions?
Yes, you can move a project that was created on Umbraco Cloud in the EU region to another region. Navigate to the migrate between regions guide for more information.
How do I select a region when creating projects on Cloud?
You can choose a region from the Region drop-down list when creating a new project.
Can I have a Baseline master project in the EU and a Baseline child project in the US?
No. Baseline projects are bound to a region for now.
Will my sites receive automatic patch upgrades of CMS, Deploy, and Forms when new releases are available?
Yes. The US region is no different than normal Cloud other than its regional location. That means that the patch-upgrade functionality will work in whichever region you choose.
Can you create Umbraco Heartcore projects in other regions besides EU?
Not at the moment.
Are all the features we have in Umbraco Cloud available in the US and UK regions?
Baseline functionality is not supported in the US and UK regions at the moment. Other than that, all features are fully supported.
Are you planning to add other regions in the future?
Yes. Once we have specific plans, we will announce them publicly.
Where can I see what region my project was created in?
The hostnames contain the region your project is hosted on. Currently, there are 3 options available when choosing a region for your Umbraco project:
West Europe (euwest01). For example,
https://west-europe-project.euwest01.umbraco.io/East US (useast01). For example,
https://east-us-project.useast01.umbraco.io/South UK (uksouth01). For example,
https://south-uk-project.uksouth01.umbraco.io/East Australia (aueast01). For example,
<https://east-australia-project.aueast01.umbraco.io/>
Backups and data retention
What backup and restore options are available on Umbraco Cloud?
Database
By default, a 35-day point-in-time database restore is available for your projects. It is also possible to restore a .bacpac file to your cloud environments.
You can read more about database backups and restores and how to perform these on Umbraco Cloud in the Databases/Backups section.
Filesystem
Umbraco Cloud keeps 30 days of snapshots of the filesystem for disaster recovery purposes.
Blob Storage containers
Umbraco Cloud keeps 35 days of snapshots of the Blob Storage container for disaster recovery purposes.
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