Last Updated on October 31, 2024 by Mathew Diekhake
Dropbox (dropbox.com) is a cloud storage service, specifically designed to host user files. Dropbox is a pioneering online file-hosting service, and one of the most popular services still in use today. This service allows its users to save, store, and synchronize their files in the cloud, akin to a virtual hard drive. Furthermore, users can access and share their files and folders on the web, mobile phones, and other applications that are connected to dropbox.com. The Wayback Machine estimates that dropbox.com was founded on December 26, 1996. However, as per dropbox.com’s timeline, the site was founded in 2007 by MIT students, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Dropbox.com was created as a solution to saving and keeping files in synch, more simply and safely.
ALTERNATIVES
Similar sites to dropbox.com include wetransfer.com, twitter.com, sugarsync.com, mozy.com, opendrive.com, mediafire.com, mega.nz, adrive.com, syncplicity.com, and spideroak.com.
DESCRIPTION
The dropbox.com homepage showed a message to sign up for free which I felt was deceptive and lowered the trust I had overall for the site. I recommend being honest with your users, and if they have to pay to use your services, you shouldn’t say they can sign up for free. If it’s possible to get a certain amount of storage for free, then it should say that rather than sign up for free in my opinion. For instance, sign up for the Basic account and get 2 GB of free data with the account. On the pricing page, I noticed that each subscription was billed yearly. I recommend letting users pay monthly as not many people can afford to pay for a full year upfront. Moreover, it’s not a good deal for users to pay full price for something and to have to pay it all at once in a yearly fee. That’s a very unusual request to make. I recommend offering monthly billing and having a yearly option but for the customers who opt for the yearly option to get a discount for paying the yearly fee up front. If you do that, it will add trust to your business because that has been the standard online for decades already in the web hosting industry.
HISTORY
As of March 2024, dropbox.com has 117.2 million monthly views (151.3M, Jan 2023), according to Similarweb. The Wayback Machine estimates that dropbox.com was founded on December 26, 1996. The Internet Archive has saved dropbox.com 151,412 times between December 26, 1996 and April 30, 2024.
Dropbox.com’s traffic has been in an exponential growth phase since 2010, when the mobile applications of dropbox were released, having the most traffic during the pandemic years of 2020-2023.
Is dropbox.com Safe?
I analyzed dropbox.com for malware and malicious content to check if it was legit or a scam. Here are the results:
I checked dropbox.com on Sucuri, and it returned as scan failed.
According to Sucuri, dropbox.com is a medium security risk because of a 409 Conflict error.
Security hardening flaws:
- The ‘unsafe-inline’ keyword in
Content-Security-Policyis not recommended. Affected pages:
https://www.dropbox.com/ for Google’s UA - The ‘unsafe-eval’ keyword in
Content-Security-Policyis not recommended. Affected pages:
https://www.dropbox.com/ for iPad’s UA
I then ran a parasite scan with Unmask Parasites on dropbox.com and it says the page is suspicious.
Unmask Parasites cites 1 suspicious inline script and 1 hidden external link found.
Long suspicious script:
(function(){"use strict";const PerfTimer="object"==typeof performance&&"function"==typeof performance.now?performance:Dat...
Hidden link:
https://www.docsend.com/dropbox-integration/?utm_source=dropbox%20referral&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=hp-jtbd&signup_source=hp-jtbd
I also checked dropbox.com on VirusTotal, and it is clean.
In conclusion, Sucuri says dropbox.com is a medium security risk because of a 409 Conflict error. Sucuri and VirusTotal report that no security vendors have deemed the domain dropbox.com as malicious. OVERALL GRADE: Relatively Safe.
Links and Profiles
Website: dropbox.com
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