Host websites on Dropbox with Site44

If you want to dive into the webmaster world and become a publisher of contents on the Internet, you have several options at your disposal to do so. You can sign up for a free hosting service like Blogger or WordPress.com to get started. The benefit of this option is that it does not cost you a dime, the negative aspect that you can't modify the site to your liking as you are limited by the tools the services make available.

Another option would be to sign up for a paid hosting account, but that is not always a good option either as you often pay years in advance which may mean that you end up with hosting space for the next one or two years even if you find out after a week or month that you do not want to continue working on the site.

A third option which may be an alternative is to use Dropbox to host your own website. One of the services that makes this dead easy is Site44.

Host websites on Dropbox

How it works? Easy! Visit the site44 website and click on the sign in with Dropbox to get started button. You are redirected to Dropbox where you are asked whether you want to connect the site with your account. The app will create a folder named site44 in the Dropbox account to which it will have full access to. If you proceed, you are taken to the next and final page of the setup.

Here you can either select a free subdomain on the site44.com website to host your site, or use your own domain name. The second option requires you to add a new CNAME record at the domain hoster before you can proceed with it. Either way, your website is in the end accessible via its subdomain or the domain that you have selected. And that's it.

You can start to edit, add or remove html pages, images and other media in the site44 Dropbox folder locally on your PC. The changes are automatically synced with Dropbox from where they are picked up by the service.

Here is a short video demonstration that walks you through the service:

Site44

The hosted website is limited to static HTML pages which makes it ideal for mockups or information that do not change. You can use JavaScript and CSS but no server side languages such as PHP or ASP.NET. You can use it to upload your resume for instance, a paper that you want to publish, or a list of links that you maintain that you want to access from all over the web.

You start out with a free starter plan that limits the number of websites to 5 and the monthly data transfer limit to 100 Megabyte per month. Paid accounts start at $4.95 per month and increase both the number of websites and the data transfer limit. It takes on the other hand only a couple of seconds before updates become available on the Internet.

Alternatives

Site44 is not the only service that you can use. There is Pancake.io which comes with a few extras such as themes or file viewers. Then there is Droppages another service supporting themes and a few extras including compression, gzipping and caching of contents for best performance.

At the end of the day, you do get excellent options to publish static HTML pages on the Internet using these services.

Responses so far:

1. Steve Marx says:

   January 11, 2013 at 6:53 pm

   Thanks for the article! I'm one of Site44's founders. FYI, we also support gzip compression and serve most hits from an in-memory cache. (This is a reaction to your mention of this features for Droppages.)

   Reply
   • Martin Brinkmann says:

     January 11, 2013 at 6:59 pm

     Steve thanks for your comment, good to know that you are also supporting that.

     Reply
2. Rick says:

   January 11, 2013 at 8:28 pm

   If you already have a host, you can just add a subdomain to an existing host and redirect to the dropbox index html link.

   I just tried this and it works like a charm (test.ourmeetingplace.org). An interesting way to add websites to an existing host account without getting hit with the download traffic.

   Reply
3. Rick says:

   January 11, 2013 at 9:04 pm

   Quick update ... I took the test down. Dropbox and Win8 seem to crash Firefox!

   Reply
4. Shea Bunge says:

   January 12, 2013 at 6:23 am

   Just a quick correction: WordPress is software for installing on your own host. WordPress.com is the hosted version. You should change the part at the beginning of the article where you say "You can sign up for a free hosting service like Blogger or WordPress to get started" to "You can sign up for a free hosting service like Blogger or WordPress.com to get started"

   Reply
   • Martin Brinkmann says:

     January 12, 2013 at 10:39 am

     Corrected, it can lead to confusion, you are right about that.

     Reply