Host a Website on Google Drive for Free

Yes, you hear that right. You don’t need to pay any money to host a website on Google Drive. All you need is a domain name, pre-built website, and Google account.

Before we move I just want to give a few pros and cons of hosting the website on Google Drive.

Pros

No need to pay any hosting (Free Hosting forever)
You can host unlimited websites
The website loads super fast. (Because it is on Google servers).
No website downtime.
Suitable for small businesses that are not very active online.

Cons

You don’t have all the flexibility you have on any other hosting platform.
Setup is little tricky
You don’t get any emails or applications.
You can’t host applications like WordPress or Magento. You can only host simple static websites.

Now you know the pros and cons of using Google drive for hosting a website. It’s time for you to decide on the kind of website you want to host. If it is a static website let’s jump into the step by step guide.

Login to your Google Account and open Google Drive.
Create a folder with the name www.yourdomain.com.
Upload your static website to that folder
Now make it public by turning on sharing the link to the public.
Open the website https://drv.tw/
Click on Host on Google Drive.
Accept all necessary permission to the website.
Now you’ll find all the list of HTML pages on your Drive.
Click on the index.html page located in the folder www.yourdomain.com.
Your website is now loading from Google Drive.
To connect that website loaded with your custom domain, copy the URL.
Now login to your Domain name provider.
Change the name servers to self-hosted in my case I am using Namecheap so I select Namecheap basic.
Now go to DNS records and delete all the existing records.
Add a new CNAME record with www and paste the value as URL you copied before.
Delete the https:// and www.yourmain.com and update the record.
Now add new URL Redirect record with host @ and value http://mydomain.com then save the records.
Wait for 2 hrs to fully propagate DNS.