How to Host Small Business Website on Dropbox

Dropbox web hosting is not any hosting provider, neither Dropbox ask users to host websites on their cloud storage platform. We all know well that, Dropbox is a simple cloud storage service. However, with few tactical methods, you can host a website on Dropbox without paying a single dollar.

With Dropbox, you can share files with anyone. But, you can host a static website and use it for promoting your small business using Dropbox. If you are new to your business, then it is quite difficult to pay hosting fees. So, a newbie can host any static web page to Dropbox, and it might be the best way to promote your new business using Dropbox service. However, there are limitations which you should know about.

• You can use only 2 GB Disk space in a month. When a Dropbox Pro user can use up to 250 GB.
• No dynamic website can be hosted to Dropbox.
• You can only host a static website (websites with static files like HTML, CSS, js, images, etc.) with a very simple layout.

Some basic benefits of Dropbox web hosting are as follows:

1. Dropbox hosting can be used for an easy start up. It is completely free to host a website on Dropbox.
2. Dropbox is reliable and very fast to serve a website.
3. 2GB web space is more than enough for a static site.
4. It is very easy to use. To upload any folder or file to Dropbox just drag it and drop it to your Dropbox window.
5. The uptime speed is good to compare to any other shared hosting.
6. Free SSL encryption security.

4 Ways to Use Dropbox as a Free Web Hosting

Method 1: Using Droppages

Droppages is the simple solution to host a website in Dropbox. It is a free service. You just need to sign-up with Dropbox credentials and grant it’s access to your Dropbox account. Just choose a sub-domain with Droppages domain name. This will create a folder in your Dropbox account. Just publish the web page and you will find a simple “Hello World” page on your website.

Method 2: Using Manual Method

Dropbox is my very favourite app that I use to synchronise files across different computers. You know well that using some third-party application one can host a small static website in Dropbox. But do you know how to host a website in Dropbox manually without any third-party service?

You should know that Dropbox has a great feature which lets you create public a link to any file in the public folder of any Dropbox account. That mean, if you know the URL of the file, you can quickly open the file directly using any modern browser. We can use this feature to host a static website in Dropbox. Let see how.

Host Free Static Webpage Using Dropbox:

1. Download and install Dropbox application to your PC.
2. Keep Dropbox client running in the system tray.
3. Create an HTML template that you want to use in Dropbox. You can Google it and download a free Html template for your static website.
4. Upload all folders to a public folder in your Dropbox account.
5. Edit any HTML file and select any texts and hyperlink the text to related HTML file.
6. You can add image and videos to any HTML file to make it’s look better. Create a folder named ‘images’ and upload the images to it. Then open the HTML file and drag the image from the image folder, drop it to HTML file. Thus, you can easily insert any image to HTML file. To add any videos, just use the embed code feature of YouTube. Tip: I prefer ‘Adobe Dreamweaver’ for any editing.
7. After doing all the editing stuff, navigate to My Documents >> My Dropbox >> Public folder and paste the entire template there.
8. Rename the folder to any other name if you wish. Though, this is optional.
9. Now, run Dropbox client so that it can find new files and folders in your PC and upload it automatically to Dropbox account.
10. Open Dropbox account using a browser and copy the link URL of the index.html file which is kept in your website folder.
11. You are done. Share the link to anyone, and they can visit your website.

Additional Attachments: If you own custom domain, then use the URL forwarding service so that one can access Dropbox hosted site directly using your custom domain name.

Alternatively, you can use URL Shortener service to shorten the URL and share it with your friends.

You can host multiple websites in Dropbox using this method. As you know, Dropbox provides 2 GB web space to free users. But this 2 GB is more than enough to host a static website in Dropbox.

Method 3: Using KISSr

KISSr works just like Droppages. You can create only one website if you are a free user. A free KISSr user is allowed to serve only 1000 requests per month. To get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage and unlimited websites, you need to pay only $5 per month.

Method 4: Using Pancake.io

Pancake.io is another service, which provides Dropbox web hosting integration. This service is very similar to Droppages and KISSr, but it supports some additional file types including Pdf, Excel, Image files, Powerpoint files and Markdown (.md) files.

Dropbox provides free web hosting service. So, there might be some limitations for web hosting. For a business start up, you can use this. However, you are not interested, then you can try any different excellent web hosting services, but you have to spend dollars for those.