How To Get Dropbox Custom Domain Name URL For Your Files

Dropbox is a fantastic resource for us, who hates free storage btw? We can store them and we can also share them. Even though we have several file hosting services, Dropbox is something which is famous for its branding and its support. Talking about Branding, I thought about sharing an important tip that might help you to brand Dropbox file URLs.

Normally a Dropbox file URL will look like this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14841459/HostLater-Logo.png

We are now going to make it look like this:

http://s.pradee.ps/hostlater-logo.png

The latter URL will redirect to the former URL and this tip or trick happens to all the files inside Dropbox’s Public folder.

Steps To Get Dropbox Custom Domain Name

Creating A Subdomain: First we need to create a subdomain for using Dropbox with it. In my case, I created ‘s.pradee.ps’ for using my personal Dropbox account. Pradee.ps is a short URL I’m using for my blog posts at my personal blog.

You can create a subdomain at your cPanel, just login and go to the section “Subdomains”. There you can create a new one.

After creating your subdomain, head right to your subdomain directory in your server. You can use Filezilla or you can use your cPanel for entering your server. I used the latter. So either way, just create a plain .htaccess file.

Now you need to copy and paste the following code there:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/ABC/$1 [L,QSA]

Remember to replace ABC with your Dropbox ID. For example, our Dropbox ID is 14841459.

How To Find Your Dropbox ID? Dropbox has a special folder called “Public”, where you can upload and share your files publicly. Just right click any file there and choose “Copy public link…”

Now you’ll get this popup with a custom Dropbox URL for that file. Here you can figure out the Dropbox ID.

Hope you got your Dropbox ID now? So kindly keep this ID in that code and now migrate to your server side, paste those two lines there and save it. That’s it.

Now whenever you are uploading a file or a pic on your Dropbox ‘Public’ folder, you can easily make your Dropbox Custom Domain Name URL as ‘yourdomain.com/filename’.

So if your file’s original Dropbox URL is https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14841459/HostLater-Logo.png

You can also make it as http://s.pradee.ps/hostlater-logo.png

That’s awesome isn’t it? Now I can easily tell my friends to access our tour photos at http://s.pradee.ps/tour-2014.zip (not live) beforehand itself.