Why H5P.org is only meant for "test-driving" H5P

H5P.org is the community site for H5P. Its purpose is to provide those new to H5P with examples and information about what H5P is and how to get started. For those using H5P it provides a forum for communicating with the rest of the community, documentation and news.

There is also a feature called "test-drive" on H5P.org. This feature is meant to allow users to try out H5P either before installing it on their own servers or before installing updates on their own servers. It is not meant to be used to create and host real content.

(H5P.com is a service for creating and hosting real H5P content and integrating H5P with other publishing platforms.)

Why you shouldn't create real content on the H5P.org test drive

Real H5P content should be created on H5P.com or on a self hosted H5P open source version. See how to get started.

We strongly discourage the use of H5P.org as a service for creating and hosting any substantial content for the following reasons:

  • When we release updates, we have to take down H5P.org and we do so without warning. This happens just about every other week.
  • When we send out newsletters we disable the embeds to handle the extra traffic from the newsletters. We do so without warning.
  • There are often unstable versions of H5P installed, it is a test-drive feature. There are examples of those using H5P.org as a "free hosting service" loosing hours of work.
  • H5P.org is hosted on a low-cost hosting provider and is often slow to respond. In very busy periods it might not respond at all.
  • We do not provide data processing agreements for H5P.org. With the GDPR interpreted strictly, it is illegal to use it if Europeans are among the target audience.
  • It is not meant to be used to host content. Again, it was designed primarily for testing purposes. We will soon start limiting the ability to embed content from H5P.org.

Why is H5P.com well suited for this and H5P.org not?

H5P.com is designed to handle insane amounts of traffic with a minimum of ten servers in each region, more servers being added automatically when needed and a network of distribution servers on top of that. H5P.org is designed to mainly handle our forum. It is just a Drupal site running on a single server which is plenty if it wasn’t for the extra traffic generated by the test drive feature.

Is H5P.com the only option? Isn't H5P free?

H5P itself is open source and we have developed free open source plugins for various publishing systems allowing users to host the free code themselves. Those hosting H5P themselves will most likely be paying someone else for the hosting. If you already have a Drupal, WordPress or Moodle site you may try out the corresponding free plugins. If you would like to both host H5P yourself and support the development of H5P you may sign up for the H5P Supporter Network.

If you don't have access to Drupal, WordPress or Moodle already we encourage you to consider signing up for H5P.com and through that help support the development of H5P, getting access to the best version of H5P and priority support in return.