Dropbox-Hosted Websites

by joeblau • 13 years ago

105 63 13 years ago

Great idea and awesome landing page -- sat through the introductory video and was really impressed with the simplicity and ease of the idea.

Also - would you like to say anything about PHP/scripting support? I saw some PHP files in the folder that was copied during the demo vid, was wondering about support for that

why-el2• 13 years ago

Given that they said they are pushing your files to their servers for load balancing, they will mostly likely add support for dynamic stuff.

namenotrequired• 13 years ago

That confused me too, especially since right under the video, the third header says "Just HTML and CSS".

jwcrux• 13 years ago

Can't you do the same thing with Github pages?

joshbert• 13 years ago

Yes, you can. The thing is that Github is still intimidating for a lot of people. They can use this as a simpler alternative.

tarr112• 13 years ago

If someone put a simple UI in front of github pages, I think they'd have a winner...

UVB-76• 13 years ago

The demo video talks about files being copied to a 'network of servers' to provide load balancing, so does this tool really produce 'Dropbox hosted' websites, or does it just use Dropbox as a mechanism for transferring files between the user and what amounts to a web host?

If it's the latter, why even bother with Dropbox as a middle man?

Shank• 13 years ago

It looks like the main use of Dropbox is just as a mechanism to upload to their service. To be fair, this is a lot easier for an end user to deal with than something like FTP, SFTP, and especially git.

est2• 13 years ago

This.

Nothing is more easier than just drag n' drop few files into a folder.

There are tons of static-generators in Ruby/Python/Nodejs/whatever, but none has the simplicity of Dropbox publishing.

Think of it, dropbox as a versioned storage for Markdown source files, third party platform to publish full-fledged rendered HTML with analytics, sitemap, feeds, mobile views, pdf/json/xml formats, etc. This is how should cloud platforms work.

Need collaboration or external contributors? Just invite your friends on Dropbox!

padseeker• 13 years ago

How is this different than backlift - https://www.backlift.com is already doing the same thing.

berdon• 13 years ago

The favicon's are the same - rebranding?

X42• 13 years ago

The brace.io homepage also looks like "drag&dropped" from the backlift folder

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

Or http://droppages.com/ or http://www.site44.com/ or http://www.kissr.com/

anotherwise• 13 years ago

http://pancake.io as well.

arohner• 13 years ago

These are the backlift guys, rebranding.

jonny_eh• 13 years ago

Oh. So they dropped the back end feature?

seldo2• 13 years ago

See also https://harp.io/

meowface• 13 years ago

Damn, just how many of these services are there?

christiangenco• 13 years ago

In 0:58 of the demo video you can see Backlift and Backlift Pro folders in /Apps. Same guys?

mattermill• 13 years ago

Exact same color scheme, down tot he forest green, so I'm guessing it's either a blatant ripoff or made by the same guys.

mjstahl• 13 years ago

Actually I think they are related to backlift.

If you look at the demo video at 0:44, you can see a 'Our support email:' section on the page that is generated. The email in that section is 'support (at) backlift.com'.

I think the convenience part is very interesting. I would be more curious to see how they plan on monetizing it.

dbla2• 13 years ago

See also http://900dpi.com and http://cloudcannon.com, which offer CMS capabilities in addition to hosting.

chrissyb• 13 years ago

or http://scriptogr.am/

jokull• 13 years ago

or http://calepin.co

Kiro• 13 years ago

How does it feel realizing it's the same service?

ende42• 13 years ago

Or TinySite (https://github.com/niko/TinySite). (Shameless plug). Ok. TinySite will separate designer and editor roles. Editors will edit Textile document.

kazagistar• 13 years ago

So, it saves you the extra click to upload via SFTP? I really am not sure I get the point. Are they targeting people who are confused and befuddled by normal file synchronization?

maxmcd• 13 years ago

ie: the majority of computer users?

wikwocket• 13 years ago

Seriously: the only reason Dropbox exists and is wildly successful is that "normal file synchronization" is such a pain, even for us hackers, let alone mere mortals.

There's a reason that you see Dropbox peeking out of the system tray of so many business professionals and other non-techies. Why not piggyback off that success?

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

That's not very convenient, even for power users. My blog runs on a custom CMS I wrote, yet it was enough of a pain that I eventually added Dropbox integration. This setup has the added advantage that all the state is always in Dropbox, backed up, and I can set up as many read-only mirrors that autosync as I want:

http://www.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/

http://mirror.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/

sebastianavina• 13 years ago

just mount an ssh folder on your local machine...

jclos• 13 years ago

What confuses me is why it is so expensive? The ones I've seen go from 5$ to 10$ a month while for a little more than $3 I could have mutualized hosting from OVH or any other host. Hell, I could probably have it preinstalled with a CMS and it would require even less work. Is the dropbox sync worth that much, or is there some benefit I am not seeing?

bby• 13 years ago

The value add on this doesn't seem very high... it can be useful in limited circumstances.

frozenport• 13 years ago

I agree.

Scenarios where you need extremely simplified website access are unlikely to be those where you need well distributed hosting.

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

Surely Dropbox itself will offer metered web hosting from DB folders soon enough. Google Drive already touts itself as a web host, despite not publishing official limits.

troymc• 13 years ago

Indeed. Amazon S3 has had this capability for some time.

Maybe Dropbox will just acquire the one that becomes most popular? Let the market pick a winner, then buy it!

seldo2• 13 years ago

So there are a handful of other services doing this same basic concept (see other comment), and none of them seem to have a story about how this scales past a single developer: sure, you can share the Dropbox folder and all work in the same place, but on something like a website with common CSS files and other centralized assets it seems like that would rapidly become unmanageable.

dbla2• 13 years ago

I think the market for these types of services is not multi-person dev teams. Instead, this is for your solo freelancer who doesn't want to deal with the hassle of hosting and where git is overkill.

jeremydw• 13 years ago

Shameless plug: Solving high-quality web site production (for a multi-person dev team, including non-developer personas such as designers, content writers, reviewers, translators, etc.) is actually part of a new project I'm working on (http://grow.io). If you (or any other reader) has an immediate need for this type of product/app, I'd love to talk to you to learn more about your requirements (and share more about my project).

benatkin2• 13 years ago

Brace is the new way to host websites

This website needs to get over itself before I'll pay any attention to it.

rfnslyr• 13 years ago

You were this offended by a cheap little marketing quote? What do you suggest?

Brace is kinda like 50~ other services, we just have a nice UI and are easier to understand. Check it out!

benatkin2• 13 years ago

No, not offended. I just assumed there was pomposity involved in the decision to use this quote.

brent_noorda2• 13 years ago

I'm totally confused (once again something on HN makes me feel like an idiot). Doesn't Dropbox already give everyone free hosting? Dropbox has been hosting my website, on their dime, for quite a while already (http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41075/brentnoorda/index.h...). So, um... What?

Kudos• 13 years ago

Presumably this service serves the site at the root of your own domain, rather than on an untypeable Dropbox URL.

corobo• 13 years ago

Just a quick heads up using Dropbox as web hosting - Google and the rest won't ever index your site as the domain has a deny-all robots.txt

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/robots.txt

brent_noorda2• 13 years ago

I hadn't thought about the indexing problem. So I moved all my pages to github.io, which google does index. Thanks.

annyway• 13 years ago

Does anyone know what API call they are using to create the auto-sync relationship?

From my review of the Dropbox API they seem to support this push in their iOS and Android SDKs but for web-based SDK it appears you can only poll their API for changes. But clearly there's an event-based push going on here. Any thoughts?

johnjelinek• 13 years ago

Why would I use this and not GitHub Pages?

why-el2• 13 years ago

Not everyone is familiar with/wants to set up git or github for mac. Remember that git users are a tiny minority among those who have or want a static site.

nickthemagicman• 13 years ago

Not sure what the advantage of this is. I guess just simplicity and easy DNS setup?

nir2• 13 years ago

Anyone has any experience reaching quota limits on Dropbox, GH-Pages etc? Would you feel comfortable hosting a very high traffic site (or even a smaller site that gets Reddited occasionally) there?

ovechtrick• 13 years ago

Looks like they don't host it on dropbox. They use dropbox like an FTP replacement.

nir2• 13 years ago

got it. thanks!

Dropbox-Hosted Websites

Related Stories