Yesterday, Google announced that it will allow users to “create and share hosted websites” via Google Drive. The service won’t support web applications like Google app Engine does, instead it would serve HTML, JavaScript and CSS files.
Google shared the announcement yesterday in Google+. It also showed a live example of the feature by hosting a file in Google Drive explaining the process.
Here’s how it works.
- Create a new folder in Drive and share it as “Public on the web.”
- Upload your HTML, JS & CSS files to this folder.
- Open the HTML file & you will see “Preview” button in the toolbar.
- Share the URL that looks like www.googledrive.com/host/… from the preview window and anyone can view your web page.
Although it is a cool feature, I don’t expect it to be a major driver in selecting cloud sharing services. It would certainly not influence users to switch from DropBox or SkyDrive.
It is also not clear, if Google has any plans to integrate this with its App Engine web application development environment. If that happens, or if Google adds support for scripting language developers would certainly be enticed; because some of them have showed interests to test the platform if it include support for language like PHP.
A few webmasters are also interested to test the new feature once things like custom domain support, maximum traffic capacity and Linux support are clarified.
Source: Google
[ttjad keyword=”cloud-storage-drive”]
Wow, now we could use Google Drive as hosting server too. It seems more feature to come, and yes, I agree with Writer @Manoj, it might get linked with Google App Engine & Google Compute Engine.