A Self-Contained Space For Each Team
A workspace is a sealed-off area inside one site. It gets its own users, groups, folders, automations, remote servers, syncs, and partners — fully walled off from the rest of the site and from other workspaces.
Model Your Whole Organization, Keep One Set Of Controls
Files.com gives you two ways to carve up one account: workspaces, which hand a team its own walled-off area inside a single site, and child sites, which are fully separate sites running under one parent. Delegate the day-to-day to the people who should run each piece, keep hard separation where you need it, and govern all of it from the top.
One Flat Account Stops Working As You Grow
Early on, one account with one admin and a tree of folders is plenty. Then you add a second division, a regional team with its own rules, an acquired company, or a set of client engagements that can’t see each other’s data — and the flat model forces a bad choice. Either you make a department lead a full site admin so they can do their job, or you become the bottleneck for every change they need.
Files.com gives you two containers so you don’t have to make that trade. Workspaces let a team run its own slice without touching anyone else’s. Child sites give a division or client a completely separate site with its own rules. Both let you delegate the work while keeping governance over the whole.
app.files.com
Workspaces — Delegate Inside One Site
For teams that need their own administrator and their own boundary but share the same domain, branding, and security policy: departments, business units, client engagements, and confidential projects.
Hand A Team Its Own Admin
Give a department lead full control of their own workspace — their users, folders, and automations — without handing them the keys to the whole site. They run their slice; they can’t see or touch anyone else’s.
One Set Of Site-Wide Settings
Every workspace shares the same domain, branding, sign-in, security policy, and audit logging, configured once at the site level. Teams get their own space; you keep one set of rules over all of it.
Unlimited And Free To Create
There’s no cap on workspaces and no per-workspace metering. Spin them up and tear them down through the web app, API, SDKs, or Terraform — which makes them a good fit for fast-moving or high-volume setups.
Child Sites — Hard Separation Under One Parent
For divisions, regions, brands, or clients that need a fully separate site — different security, different sign-in, different storage region — while billing and governance stay consolidated.
A Completely Separate Site
A child site is a full, separate Files.com site under one parent. Its own subdomain, custom domain, IP addresses, sign-in providers, ciphers, certificates, branding, and storage region — everything a top-level site has, set independently per child.
Different Rules Per Site
Two child sites under the same parent can run different security policies, different sign-in providers, different storage regions, and different branding. The right tool when separation has to go below site-wide settings — say, a HIPAA site and a non-PHI site.
Govern Them All From The Top
A management policy lets the parent enforce settings across every child site — require encrypted protocols, mandate two-factor sign-in, set a retention period — that child-site admins can’t override. Flexible structure, centralized control.
One Bill, One Rolled-Up Total
Storage, bandwidth, billable users, and API calls roll up across the parent and every child site into a single total for the organization, and each child runs at the parent plan’s feature level.
Run A Whole Business On Top Of Files.com
Workspaces and child sites are what let a services firm, reseller, or MSP run file transfer for many clients from one account. Each client gets a child site on its own domain — branded as theirs through white-labeling so Files.com disappears entirely — with its own security and storage region. You manage every client centrally, enforce a baseline across all of them, and bill from one total.
Each client’s IT lead (or your own per-account engineer) runs their slice without ever getting site-wide access. The identity and permission layer sets who can do what inside each space. Workspaces and child sites set how the spaces themselves stay separate and governed.
How Groups Of Companies Run It
Holding companies, multi-brand groups and regulated enterprises use child sites for the same four reasons.
A Site Per Brand, Under One Parent
Each operating company or brand gets its own child site with its own domain, branding, users and partners, while the parent holds identity, policy and the bill. A sibling division can never see another’s data, because there is no shared tree to misconfigure.
Acquisitions Without Re-Onboarding Partners
An acquired company’s file exchange moves onto its own child site with its hostname and credentials intact, so its partners keep connecting exactly as before while IT governs it from the top. A divestiture runs the same play in reverse.
A Regulated Division Walled Off From The Rest
HR, a HIPAA-covered unit or an ITAR program runs on a child site whose own administrators are the only ones who can reach it, so the platform team that runs everything else sits outside the boundary an auditor asks about.
Dev, Test And Production That Never Touch
A test site mirrors production configuration with none of its data, so a new partner integration or automation is proven end to end before it is promoted, and a misrouted test file cannot become a production incident.
Workspaces And Child Sites Questions
What teams ask about choosing between the two containers, keeping tenants separate, and governing many sites from one parent.
A workspace is a walled-off area inside one site that shares the site’s domain, branding, sign-in, and security policy — right for delegating day-to-day administration to a team. A child site is a fully separate site with its own domain, sign-in, security policy, and storage region — right when separation has to go below the site-wide settings. The short version: workspaces delegate operations within one site; child sites are hard separation between sites.
Use a child site when teams need different security policies, different sign-in providers, different storage regions for data residency, or separate brands and domains — anything that has to differ below the site-wide level. Use a workspace when teams need their own administrator and their own resource boundary but can share one security policy, domain, and brand, like internal departments, business units, or client engagements.
No. Creating a child site stands up real infrastructure — DNS records, certificates, IP allocation, and a separate database tenant — so it’s done through the web interface by a parent-site administrator. Workspaces are the opposite: unlimited, unmetered, and fully scriptable through the API, SDKs, and Terraform.
No. Sibling child sites can’t reach each other and can’t reach the parent. The only bridge is the parent’s underscore folder, where a parent-site administrator can browse, copy, and run automations against each child site’s content. Each child site starts completely empty — no files, users, or settings carry over from the parent.
Stand up a child site per client, each on its own domain with its own sign-in and storage region, branded so the client never sees Files.com or your other clients. You manage them all centrally from the parent, enforce baseline security across every tenant with a management policy, and get one consolidated bill. Reselling child sites does require a separate reseller agreement with Files.com — so the right next step there is a conversation with us, not an off-the-shelf plan.
Workspaces are the unlimited, unmetered container. Child sites require a qualifying plan — they’re available on Power and Enterprise, metered and billed, with enough included for most Enterprise customers at little to no added cost. See current plan terms on the pricing page.
Files.com gives the acquired company its own child site under your parent account, keeps its custom domain and imports its users, so partners keep the same hostname, logins and folder paths. Your team takes over identity, retention and audit from the parent without a cutover the partners can see. The same move works for retiring the server they ran once the traffic is on the child site, and the acquired company’s databases and archives themselves arrive through acquisition data staging.
Run a separate child site for test, with the same folder structure, automations and partner setup as production and none of its data. Child sites are unlimited and free to create, so each new partner or integration is proven there first and promoted by repeating the configuration, or by applying it with Terraform or the API.
Yes. Each Files.com child site has its own administrators, folder tree and retention while single sign-on and SCIM provisioning come from the parent’s identity provider, so a HIPAA-covered division stays out of reach of other administrators without running a second directory.
Give Every Team Its Own Space
Start a free trial, carve your account into workspaces or child sites, and hand each team the slice it should run — while you keep one set of controls over everything.
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