Discontinuing rendering of HTML content

[Perry P.]

Got email notice from dropbox that they are discontinuing HTML rendering.  This is going to cause major issues for my wife since she uses this to distribute info and files to her students.  We are running a basic account and would be willing to upgrade to a paid account to retain this feature, but this policy seems to be across all account levels.

Any advice on alternatives?

[George E.]

Pro user here.  This will cause major headaches for me.  I have a blog on github that gets its photos from dropbox and AWS (yes I can use AWS but it's a lot less friendly than DB).  Gonna break a lot of posts.  Of course, no one will probably look....

Say, if DB identifies someone spreading malware, can't they just put a malware file on their computer?  Just sayin

[R K]

George E, If the photos are not stored as HTML files on Dropbox, then it doesn't sound like this change will cause a problem.

[Rich]

If the photos are not stored as HTML files on Dropbox, then it doesn't sound like this change will cause a problem.

Correct. At this time this seems to be affecting HTML files only. The display of other file types (images, etc.) should continue to work. For how long, who knows...

[Sandy N.2]

The only reason I pay for a pro account is for the bandwidth needed to serve up my site.  If they go through with this I will revert to basic (free) take the $100/month I am paying for this and move my site somewhere else.  How many other pro users will go elsewhere for this?  If there are a lot, maybe dropbox can reconsider this for pro users...

[Mark]

If there are a lot, maybe dropbox can reconsider this for pro users...

As with the XP changes they will have already factored this in.

Sorry

[Anoop G.]

I am in the same situation -- use dropbox to host a static site.  Did some research and already moved to bitballoon.  Had to change all the links pointing to files in dropbox from relative to absolute ones.

Here are a couple of sites (somewhat dated) that folks here may find useful:

http://alignedleft.com/resources/cheap-web-hosting

http://designrope.com/toolbox/static-web-hosting/

So far, I have not been able to find anything as easy as dropbox [not true, see update below], but bitballoon is as close as it gets.  However, I have already encountered errors uploading files (although the pages work fine despite the error message) and help is hard to come by.

I may have to learn git and instead host the pages on github pages.

One of the solutions mentioned in the links above is updog.co.  I'm trying to find out if that will continue to work after this change by emailing the owner of that service.

Update: I heard back from Jesse, the owner/creator of updog:

>>>

Updog is not affected by this update, because it uses the DropBox API.

If you send viewers this link - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/<jekyll's page id>/index.html They will see raw unrendered HTML.

If you send viewers and updog link, like - https://jekyll.updog.co/ They will see the rendered HTML with all the styling.

Thanks for using updog and let me know if you have any other questions.

>>>

So it looks like this is the easiest alternative for those of us that have been using dropbox.  All I had to do was move the files in my Dropbox public directory, ~/Dropbox/Public/*, under ~/Dropbox/apps/updog/<my site name>, and now users can access it at <my site name>.updog.co.

[Dave C.21]

Sadly, updog is not working for me...not sure why...

My original site...https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2758377/lummux/index.html

Copied to updog...https://lummux.updog.co/

[Anoop G.]

^ Novice here but perhaps updog doesn't like something in your html file?

When I run it through the html validator, I get a bunch of errors:

https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Flummux.updog.co%2F

[Dave C.21]

Maybe, I'm a novice too. But it works in normal dropbox public folder, this is just a copy of all the files...point is, it looks like it's not as simple as you hoped.

[Anoop G.]

True.  I think fixing the very first error will help.

Try putting this at the very top of every html file.  You could just try with the index.html first.

<!DOCTYPE html>