Google Drive web hosting is shutting down

Aug 09, 2016

With the August 8 announcement that Google is shutting down web hosting via Google Drive, it seems Articulate customers may need to scramble for a free alternative. Has anyone had success with the hosting alternatives recommended by Google?

Here's the full text from the announcement:

Hello Administrators,

We announced last year that we’re deprecating web hosting in Google Drive for users and developers. On Aug 31, 2016, we will discontinue serving content via googledrive.com/host/[id].

Our records show that users in your organization have hosted webpages in Drive. We attached a CSV file that lists the shared items that were served via Drive web hosting in recent weeks.

As an alternative to web hosting in Drive, we recommend these options:

Drive API: If you’re using the web-hosting feature to provide signed-in users access to public Drive items, you can use the Drive API instead.
Firebase Hosting: If you’re using the web-hosting feature to provide users access to static webpages with content that’s on Drive, you can migrate to Firebase. To migrate, upload the content to Firebase and serve pages via Firebase-specific URLs.
Google Cloud Platform: If you’re already a Google Cloud Platform customer, we recommend migrating to Google Cloud Platform static-website hosting.
If you don’t make updates by Aug 31, files served via the web-hosting feature will fail to load.

If you have any questions, please contact Google Apps Support.

Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

5 Replies

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
Staff

almost 8 years ago08/09/16 at 6:34 pm (UTC)

Hi Daniel,

I haven't heard about any other services from Google yet, but we do mention a couple others in this article you could look into.

over 7 years ago09/04/16 at 9:27 pm (UTC)

Also Dropbox will "be discontinuing the ability to render HTML content in-browser via shared links or Public Folder. If you're using Dropbox shared links to host HTML files for a website, the content will no longer display in-browser." This change will take effect on October 3, 2016.

I don't think it's a good idea to use file storage services for hosting purposes. As mentioned in the posting by the topic starter, using Buckets on Google Cloud Platform is an affordable and reliable alternative.

Best regards,

Maik