Google drive pdf embedding in rich text gives “no preview available” after a while of publishing. I delete and add the embed again with the same link and it works again, but after a while i check the page and i get a no preview gray box.
It could happen with Dropbox, in different way. Dropbox and Gdrive will eventually not serve content, randomly. Dropbox will do it a lot less than Gdrive.
The reason is those 2 services offer documents embed and direct http links, but don’t want to be considered as CDN (professional hosting). They want to facilitate your life, but they don’t want you to use those sharing on a production site with potentially a lot of traffic. Those are unwritten but known rules.
So Gdrive and Dropbox, use them during dev to facilitate your life, but don’t count on them for production.
Maybe this happens mush less when you actually pay for your cloud storage…
If you’re doing web development and working on many sites, and have steady needs for hosting things on a CDN (documents, archives to download etc), it’s worth taking a cheap virtual server. Prices starts at as low as $5 a month for decent space.
I’m kinda sure Webflow will soon offer limited CDN space for each site.
