I was wondering if it were a legitimate use of DropBox (or any of the other free cloud hosts), to serve the files of it as public files. I doubled it once from 2 to 4 GB and my site (a popular woodworking community in Hebrew) is getting close to using the disk space available for the images people are uploading. Still have to rip all my movies etc but this solves the data storage.I am approaching the limits of my hosting plan. I’m running this off my laptop and was planning to spend $4k or so to build a nice PC to rip and run the server and get a NAS, but this revelation can save me money and avoid the server. Sharing with family but don’t expect more than 10 streams simultaneously, absolute max. Question: does anyone else do this? Anyone see a problem with it? Obvious drawbacks if internet goes out, node bandwidth limits, Dropbox server limit - I’ve seen up to 30MB/s with them, stable around 10MB/s (Box is way better btw as a side note, not sure why, but I have saturated the gigabit connection uploading to them, non stop/stable).

Plex appears to be running very stable now, I haven’t got a Plex pass yet, but will test that with streaming etc. I have gigabit symmetrical internet and no data cap. I uploaded several MKV movies (full file size, 4GB DVD’s) and added the library to Plex. I found an app today called ExpanDrive that allows the Dropbox to be mounted as a drive on my Mac. And I didn’t want the upfront cost of a NAS at the time. It’s about $600/yr (unlimited data) but I didn’t want her running into a situation where she had corrupted data or lost a drive or the house burned down etc.

Context: for my wife’s photography business I just set her up with a business Dropbox account years ago and we both use it, write off the expense.

Using dropbox as a server