Bandwidth Limits in Dropbox

The other day I shared how you may use Dropbox as a CDN to host the static content of your WordPress site. That will not only improve the performance of your website, because you are now using a CDN, but will also decrease the bandwidth requirement of your own web server since some of the files are getting served through Dropbox.

Dropbox provides nearly 2.5 GB of free storage space and that is obviously more than enough to host all the images, CSS and other static files of most websites. However, there’s a caveat you should be aware of. 

Bandwidth Limits for Public Folders in Dropbox

If you have a low-traffic site, the above solution may work without issues but for everyone else, it may not always be a good idea to use Dropbox as a file hosting service.

That’s because Dropbox imposes certain bandwidth limits on files in the Public folder and if you exceed that limit, the URLs of your public file may be temporarily disabled thus returning a 404 error to your visitors.

According to Dropbox support, public links for free accounts may not use more than 10GB of bandwidth per day while that limit is 250GB per day for paid Dropbox accounts. The links are automatically suspended if any of your files exceed that limit.

For comparison, let’s say you have a one page website hosted on Dropbox and the entire weight of all the images, CSS and other static files served through that page is around 400 kb. That means the page should have less than 25k impressions in a day for you to stay within the Dropbox limit.

And if another site decides to hotlink to your static images, it may exhaust your “free bandwidth” quota even sooner.

Thankyou@dattu.