You Can Now Host Webpages on Google Drive!

If you’re like me, and use cloud storage a lot, then at some point, you might have felt the urge to put your free online space to better use. Now most of us love Google – or at least we love some of its products. So here’s another feature in Google Drive you might enjoy. You can now use your Drive to host webpages! We had this kind of functionality in DropBox already. But this feature coming to Google Drive means a lot, especially since Google Drive offers more starting space than DropBox. And since a lot of webmasters have a Google Account, this will be a welcome news for them, as they will be able to test simple webpages and share them with others right on their Drive.

Why host pages on the cloud?

Well, for starters, cloud storage is a great way to share your files privately with your friends and family. You can build webpages, and then test them your Google Drive to see how they’d look on a browser. This could be a great way for freelancers to show their clients their site’s design, or its progress.

Now, of course the purpose of this post isn’t to tell you to host your websites on Google Drive. That’d be ridiculous, since it’ll raise storage and bandwidth concerns. Besides, you can’t get the full functionality of a dynamic, database-driven website here. On Google Drive, you can only host pages driven by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No other scripting, such as PHP, ASP, Python etc is possible.

How to host pages?

Hosting webpages on your Google Drive is really simple. Here’s what you need to do;

• Log into your Google Drive. You should do this from your browser, and not from your desktop Google Drive folder.
• Create a new folder in your Google Drive, and set its sharing to “Public, on the web” (right-click to get to its settings).
• Now, upload all your HTML and CSS and/or JavaScript files into this folder. I am assuming that you already know you should name one html file default.html or index.html – this is your home file.
• Now, from your browser, find your website’s home page from your Google Drive. Just open it, and you’ll see a “Preview” button in the toolbar. Click on it.
• From the preview window, copy the link that should be something like https://googledrive.com/host/….. Now, this is the public link to your homepage. You can share this with people you want to share your website with. They will be able to navigate through your website easily once they have this link.
• And…..you’re done!

Yeah, it’s that simple! If you still don’t believe this could be done, just check out the instructions released by Google on the subject. And guess what? These instructions are themselves on a webpage hosted on Google Drive! Now that is what I call setting precedence 😛

That’s it for now. If you have questions, do let me know in the comments below. Peace buddies 🙂