Host Your Website on Google Drive : Detailed Guide

Host your website on Google Drive – you can actually use Google Cloud to host and serve static HTML webpages. This is a detailed guide with reference to MIME. Yes, everything is free but frankly this is not very easy option for the beginners, it is better if you think about Dropbox (we wrote about Dropbox hosting on our Creating a Free Photography Website on Dropbox Cloud guide or if you want to use Rackspace Cloud Files, you can check this article – it has Video guide too.) We guess you can do works like hosting a Music Player like we have shown with Cloud Files.

Host your website on Google Drive : Before We Begin

There are lot of such such guides on How to Host your Website on Google Drive, but we will try to point towards a developer’s side to get more control.
Reference of How to Host your Website on Google Drive is Official, and you can read these :

https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site

Actually it depends on the set MIME Type and Internet Media Type. You can read about Internet Media Type or Content Types and Creating a Free Photography Website on Dropbox Cloud.

Host Your Website on Google Drive : Steps

As you can understand, the things are basically the same. You can view this basic webpage :

https://googledrive.com/host/0B716ywBKT84AMXBENXlnYmJISlE/GoogleDriveHosting.html

The folder containing site assets must be public, or “Public on the web.” Assets added to public folders must also be public on the web. It is obvious. If you do not save the MIME Type, the HTML source code will become browser readable :
https://googledrive.com/host/0BwPiT3UtCwqsYVlYc2tXazExTE0/index.html
It has both Plus and Minus Points. Plus is that, for creating a basic webpage, you need no uploading and complex coding. Simply do these :

Just make the folder public, create a new document, Write in Editor on Drive, Publish it as Publicly viewable file and from File option menu of the Editor, you will get an option to publish to web option, the URL will be like this (see it) :

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gj9GgbVUJ0PqJ04Q1N7u7KDMSTs9R36y4u22U7NHlLE/pub 

If you upload any zip file with all the CSS, HTML files, that will be easier but will require to install Google’s plugins or use Chrome Browser.