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Comment by kazagistar | Hacker News Reader

So, it saves you the extra click to upload via SFTP? I really am not sure I get the point. Are they targeting people who are confused and befuddled by normal file synchronization?

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That's not very convenient, even for power users. My blog runs on a custom CMS I wrote, yet it was enough of a pain that I eventually added Dropbox integration. This setup has the added advantage that all the state is always in Dropbox, backed up, and I can set up as many read-only mirrors that autosync as I want:

http://www.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/

http://mirror.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/

just mount an ssh folder on your local machine...

This is a dynamic CMS, the content is markdown files, and it's hosted on GAE. Plus, I don't like the latency SSH has when saving.

ie: the majority of computer users?

Seriously: the only reason Dropbox exists and is wildly successful is that "normal file synchronization" is such a pain, even for us hackers, let alone mere mortals.

There's a reason that you see Dropbox peeking out of the system tray of so many business professionals and other non-techies. Why not piggyback off that success?

Simplicity is the key to Dropbox. Their MO is to reduce the number of answers a user needs to know. This is a (rather fantastic) evolution of that.

What confuses me is why it is so expensive? The ones I've seen go from 5$ to 10$ a month while for a little more than $3 I could have mutualized hosting from OVH or any other host. Hell, I could probably have it preinstalled with a CMS and it would require even less work. Is the dropbox sync worth that much, or is there some benefit I am not seeing?

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