It's been possible to host simple websites on Google Drive for a while now

Feb 6, 2013 19:41 GMT  ·  By

Google is making it a bit more official and has now published a small guide on how to host simple websites with Google Drive. This has been possible for a while, we showed you a guide on how to do it a couple of months back.

But Google is now acknowledging the capability and has added a Preview button to HTML files, making it possible to render them in the browser rather than just view their content.

Publishing a website through Google Drive is a simple process.

First, the limitations, HTML, CSS and JavaScripts are fine, everything that runs in the client, i.e. the browser, will work, but anything that requires servers-side technologies, PHP, MySQL and so on, won't.

To get a website running in Google Drive, first create a folder, which will house all of the source files.

The folder needs to be made public for this to work, so you have to share it as "Public on the web." This will mean that everyone with access to the (rather long and pretty much impossible to guess) link will be able to view your files.

Upload your HTML, CSS, JS files, images and all other resources to that folder. Then all you have to do is click on the main HTML file which will open it in the editor.

There, you'll notice the Preview button which will open the HTML file as a web page in your browser.

If you want to share the page with others, copy the URL you see when previewing the page, it will be something like https://googledrive.com/host/shared_folder_ID/file_name.html.

Again, all of this has been possible, all that's new is Google providing some documentation on it. In fact, Google's guide is actually hosted on Google Drive via this very feature.

Google Drive is not the only one enabling this, Amazon offers simple hosting via its AWS S3.