Google recently announced that it has added the possibility of publishing real web pages using its Cloud storage service, Google Drive, as free hosting of html files . Thanks to this new feature, without having to use third-party tools or plugins, you can also host an entire website, accessible for anyone, without spending a penny on hosting.
To publish customized and any kind of web pages using Google Drive, you just need to log into Google Drive with your account, create a new folder with a name of your choice and share it publicly.
To configure sharing, right-click on the created folder, go to Share and then, where Private is written, click Change and then on Publish on the web
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Then you have to put all the website resources in a zip file and then click here to upload the zip file to Google Drive.
Once the file is uploaded, the tool will generate the website's public URL.
In the zip file you can insert an HTML file and also any Javascript or CSS files that are called from the HTML page.
In the zip file there must be at least one index.html file that will act as the homepage of the site.
Internally, the work is done by this little Google script.
If you are using the tool for the first time, you may need to click on the "Authorize" button, as the script requires permission to upload the zip file to Google Drive.
Google Drive websites have a URL structure like googledrive.com/host/ and there is no way to change this default URL.
A solution for using a custom domain would be to wrap the Google Drive website URL inside an IFRAME tag.
Google Drive web hosting can be used immediately and for free even if the available bandwidth is not unlimited so if the web page is visited thousands of times, it will be blocked.
To create and write HTML files directly from Google Drive, using the Google Chrome Browser, you can install an application such as Drive-Notepad or html editor.
For those who have never started with HTML, in other articles:
- Create free websites and make a website without html
- Free internet space to open and publish a website with free hosting
The same thing is possible using Dropbox as free hosting for static websites
