Data storage with shinyapps.io

I was looking at the Persistent data storage in Shiny apps post. It's focusing on being able to both read and write data. I was just interested in reading data, so the problem is simpler for me. One of the potential free options is to host the file on Dropbox. However, I am concerned Dropbox would suspend my account if there were too many download requests, since it's meant as a file sharing service for individuals and small groups. Otherwise, many people would be using it as a free alternative to paid services like Amazon S3. Is that a valid concern? Are there better options for storing data for use on shinyapps.io? Obviously, for a self-hosted Shiny server, you could just store the files on the same server.

If it's tabular data, you could consider sticking it in a Google Sheet and then accessing it with googlesheets.

See here for some examples of googlesheets used with shiny apps.

For non-tabular data, you could use the googledrive package.

As far as I can tell, the Google Drive/Sheets APIs seem to have more generous rate limits than Dropbox.

Happy dashboarding!

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