Discontinuing rendering of HTML content

Richard P.:

Your response indicates that Dropbox is able to determine who is using this feature for malware and who is not. If that is true, why not issue a warning to bad actors and then disable it for those that don't comply and let legitimate users continue to use this feature? You're changing an important feature that has been very helpful to many legitimate users.

The notice I got says that this change will be effective a year from now: "Please note that this change will take effect for your account on September 1, 2017".

By the way, what is the reason for this change? Security concerns?

I am a basic user so it is one month notice.  While moving to a dedicated web host is an option, it is not as easily to implement for a novice user as Dropbox is/was.  While I understand there could be abuses, making this part of a paid tier makes more sense to me than just discontinuing it.  I am sure I am not the only one who took advantage of this feature.

I rather pay for Dropbox (upgraded service) and retain the simple benefits of publishing to a shared folder than paying for a web host that requires either ftp or web based file uploads.  

why not issue a warning to bad actors and then disable it for those that don't comply and let legitimate users continue to use this feature

Because people can set up infinite accounts in seconds - quicker than they can be removed.

By this do you mean that they can set up infinite Dropbox free accounts? If so, why not keep this feature for paid Dropbox accounts?

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...

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

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:

>>>

>>>

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.

I am in exactly the same boat. Trying to find an alternative now. Exams coming up soon too :(

Basic users will see this feature discontinued in October this year, while Pro and Business users have more of a grace period, September 2017.

The change was made because the feature was being abused (malware etc) significantly more than it was being legitimately used.