When you run a nonprofit on WordPress, storage costs have a way of sneaking up on you. The site grows, media accumulates, and at some point your webhosting provider tells you the plan you’re on isn’t going to cut it anymore. The upgrade they’re offering costs more, and that money isn’t coming from nowhere. For a lot of nonprofits, it comes out of the budget that was supposed to go somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
InnoVators is a student pitch competition that collects applications, event photography, and years’ worth of student-submitted media through their WordPress site. They were almost out of storage on GoDaddy’s basic hosting tier, and GoDaddy’s solution was a VPS upgrade that would have cost them $551.63 a year for only 10GB more than they already had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They didn’t take the upgrade. They offloaded their entire media library to Infinite Uploads<\/a>, dropped to the cheapest GoDaddy plan available, and ended up with 20GB MORE storage than before<\/a> at a lower total cost. Big File Form Uploads<\/a> solved the other half of the problem: students were hitting form\/server upload limits when trying to submit videos through the application form, and that stopped the moment they installed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n InnoVators, formerly Celebrating High School Innovators, is a nonprofit pitch competition that gives high school and college students a chance to present real ideas to a panel of judges. These aren’t just business school students running hypothetical companies. They’re kids who have built something, whether that’s a startup, a product, a nonprofit of their own, or a business concept they’ve been developing. The competition awards prizes, and for the organization, every dollar of budget that goes toward hosting is a dollar that doesn’t go toward students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Applications come in through a Forminator-powered nonprofit application form on their WordPress site. Students fill it out and upload supporting media as part of the submission process: photos, videos, product demos. Then there’s the event itself. InnoVators brings in professional photographers for competition day, and those raw images run 15 to 20MB each. With 100 to 200 photos per year, a single competition cycle adds several gigabytes to the media library on its own. Year after year, it stacks up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n InnoVators was paying $323.88 per year for GoDaddy’s Hosting for WordPress Ultimate plan, which came with 30GB of storage. They were nearly at the ceiling. GoDaddy’s recommendation was to move to a VPS at $551.63 per year. That plan offered 40GB, which would have bought them maybe another year before they hit the same problem again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of the storage crunch, students submitting applications were running into a different wall. WordPress limits file upload sizes by default, and that limit applies inside Forminator too. Students trying to include video in their submission were hitting size errors before the file reached the server. Some gave up. Others contacted the organization for help. It was friction at exactly the wrong moment in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “As a non-profit, the costs with our hosting provider were getting too high for our increasing storage needs. This obviously affected how much we can give back to the students.”<\/em><\/strong> — Paul Ritter, Director<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n One of their board members recommended Infinite Uploads. The team wasn’t aware of other cloud storage options for WordPress at the time, so they signed up and tried it. No comparison shopping, no lengthy evaluation process. A trusted recommendation, an obvious problem, and a plugin that promised to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first thing they addressed was the student-facing problem. Big File Form Uploads raises WordPress’s upload ceiling directly at the form level inside Forminator, way beyond what you can increase your server’s max upload size to. Students can now submit large video files through the nonprofit application form without running into a size error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That change resolved the friction students had been reporting. Files come in (because Forminator throws silent errors if an image is too big), they get offloaded through Infinite Uploads, and GoDaddy’s server never has to deal with the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The person managing InnoVators’ website is a science teacher. Not a developer. Not a WordPress consultant. A science teacher who runs this nonprofit on the side and describes themselves as someone who “barely knows anything about websites, but learns fast.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n They created an Infinite Uploads account, installed the plugin, clicked through the setup, and the sync started pulling their entire existing media library into the cloud. It took time because the library was large, but the process itself required nothing from them once it started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only moment they needed support was at the end, when it came time to delete the local copies of the offloaded files. They were too nervous to click the button themselves (honestly, fair), so our support team logged in, confirmed everything had transferred successfully, and cleared the local storage. That freed up enough space to downgrade the GoDaddy plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Offloading your hosting sounds scary and difficult, but Infinite Uploads made it easy. We just created an account and clicked a few buttons after installing the plugin, and it synced all of our existing images.”<\/em><\/strong> — Paul Ritter, Director<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Their media library is a mix of student-submitted content and competition photography:<\/p>\n\n\n\nMeet InnoVators<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Challenge: WordPress Hosting for Nonprofits Gets Expensive Fast<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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How They Found Infinite Uploads<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Fixing the Application Form Upload Limit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Getting Everything Offloaded, With No Developer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What InnoVators Stores<\/h2>\n\n\n\n