Social networks won the game over blogs. These, in turn, previously overshadowed web pages. But all these options continue to exist and they are all valid so that your personal or brand image reaches everywhere. It's more. Today you can host your website for free in many ways. One of them consists of taking advantage of your free space in Dropbox or Google Drive.
Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive, to name three of them, allow you to create, edit and store documents. But they also serve to upload any file or file. And share them so that others can see and/or download them. If this is the case with documents, why with a web page?
If you have a website of a certain size, it is convenient to have a good hosting provider. But for a simple web page, we can go to solutions such as Blogger, WordPress or Notion, on the one hand, or directly to online storage offered by services such as Google Drive.
Your website on OneDrive and Google Drive
First option, DriveToWeb. It is a veteran solution that is still standing and works relatively well. Free, ad-free, and compatible with two of the most popular personal clouds. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive.
Its operation is simple, three simple steps. And, in return, it offers support for HTML files but also CSS and JavaScript. Come on, you can host your professional website without problems and taking advantage of the free space offered by Google or Microsoft.
First we upload the files that correspond to the web page. We then set the folder that houses that content to public. That way it will be visible to anyone , even if they don't have our personal password. The last step, log in from DriveToWeb to get the necessary links for our users to visit the web page.
As I said, the service is free, although you can contribute your grain of sand with a donation. Otherwise, it is aimed at educators, students, non-profit organizations, and web enthusiasts. In other words, if you expect to get money from your website, it is better to look for paid hosting.
Hosting your website on Dropbox
If you want your website to be on Dropbox, there is bad news. Dropbox disabled the ability to make HTML files public in both free and paid accounts. If you want to host your website in Dropbox, you should go to solutions like DropPages.
Due to the services it offers, DropPages can only be used for a fee. It has a free trial period of 7 days, and from there it works by subscription. In exchange, you will be able to host your website on Dropbox with a own subdomain and bypassing the official limitations of Dropbox.
For example, we can add new files, write in Markdown instead of HTML, etc. Otherwise, it supports HTML, CSS, and JavaScript content but not PHP. It also offers web analytics, templates, automatic SSL, CDN features and automatic publishing.
Get link on Google Drive and OneDrive
The previous method is very simple, but with Google Drive and OneDrive we can make it even simpler. In principle, following the instructions above, it is possible to publish a web page hosted on Google Drive and OneDrive for free. And without resorting to third-party tools. However, we cannot do this on Dropbox, which disabled this option in September 2017, for both free and paid accounts.
As we saw before, we only have to upload a folder with the web page that we want to publish to OneDrive or Google Drive. Various files, such as images, HTML documents, various folders, JavaScript, CSS documents… The second step, we will make the entire folder public. To do this, we right-click, click on Share and, finally, we will mark the folder as public. Finally, we go to the HTML file that acts as home page or main page, we right click, click on Get link and, finally, we change the option Restricted by Anyone with the link. The link that we will see there is the one that our users will need to enter your web page.
In principle, both Google Drive and OneDrive allow you to host your web page with static files such as images, HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Instead, it supports PHP files. A small sacrifice in exchange for having a free website.
