Google drive hosting is the best way to easily develop a project without paying web hosting charges. You can easily upload your website files to your Drive Storage and start sharing your website project with your friends, family and public. Google drive is a property of web giant Google Inc. and with Google servers your website will never face downtime and your site also secure with SSL certificate.
If you’re a beginner and just start learning about Web designing languages such as HTML, CSS or JavaScript then it will be the best option for you and you can easily share your project with anyone in this world. Many new web designers work in a group and they want a web hosting to test their HTML pages, but with Google Drive hosting you can easily share the website link with your friends with just a click.
According to Google drive limitations, your free storage limit is 15 GB that applies to Drive, Gmail, Google+ photos, and more. After the limit will exhausted, you need to pay for more storage. But, if you only upload website pages on the drive so just relax because website pages are smaller in size.
You can only host HTML, CSS, JavaScript files in Google drive, if your project is developed in different web language like PHP, ASP or JSP then you have to buy a web hosting package from web. Using drive hosting for testing HTML projects is good, but using the drive hosting for business is not good.
Step 1. Create a new folder and get folder ID
- First, login to your Google drive account(click here) and Create a new folder (you can put any name to folder without space and symbols).
- Right click on the folder and click: Share
- In who can access, change private to public
- Copy the folder id as shown in below snapshot.
Step 2. Upload your website files
If you are taking this tutorial for test, so you can easily download this sample > Extract files from zip to your desktop > and upload the files to the folder you created on Google drive at the step 1.
Now your project is ready, and you have to only enter the URL in the address bar and your website is just opened.
Step 3. Access your website
On your browser, open a new tab and type this https://googledrive.com/host/<Folder_id>/<File_name>/ and hit Enter. Replace Folder id with the ID you copy on step 1 and file name is index.html. According to my sample project, you can rename file name or upload any file to the folder.
Example: My Sample Website is here https://googledrive.com/host/0ByHj3mhS2JzuUnFRbS1tNjY1Rjg/
If you didn’t type file name so default file is index.html, which is a your home page as you know.
Editing HTML Files inside Drive
To edit your html file inside drive without wasting time in uploading again, connect an app called HTML Editey with your drive account.
- Right click to html file.
- Select open with.
- Click connect more apps.
- Search html editey and connect.
With this app you can easily edit and save your website html files online.
More about hosting websites on Google drive
Your project or website is secure with SSL as you can see at the URL. You can also upload multimedia files like images, videos or music and put on your website pages. Use multimedia file URL without full path, For example – If you want to add a video file name “youmov” and format is mp4, so use “youmov.mp4” in your page. It’s only work if you upload your multimedia file in website folder not on sub folder. These are some video file format supported on Drive, see here.
You can also use a Google script, that upload your website files as a zip and extract automatically in a new folder. Just click here and upload zip of your all website files. Now, see in your Google drive account, a folder automatically creates and you got your project link after upload completes. It is a kind of web app and you better know web apps are very useful for web designers and developers.
If you want to crawl a Google drive hosted website in a search engine, then you are totally allowed to do this but there is not ranking benefits applies to your site. I found a URL on search which is hosted on Google drive.
Google drive domain doesn’t help your web page to rank in search results, so if you are thinking that googledrive.com ranks well in google search and my website also rank up in search engine, then you are going totally wrong. Use drive hosted website for sharing with your friends or workers as a test project.
You can also choose specific peoples to view your site make changes on your files. To do that, right click to your website folder, click share > Change access can view to can edit.
Connect more apps with your drive account that helps you edit more file extensions.
Update – Google deprecated web hosting support in Google Drive.
