Google on Tuesday announced that it will allow Web developers to share hosted websites via Google Drive. All you have to do is store your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files, and then share a link to your starting HTML file.

In fact, Google is eating its own dog food by hosting the instructions on how to do this yourself, on Google Drive.

Here’s what you have to do:

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.

It’s a small update, but certainly a welcome one for Web developers. If you build or design sites and need to demo your work for clients, this should be a very useful way to show off what you’ve got so far.

Again, we don’t recommend using Google Drive as your main hosting service, but if you’re using Google Drive anyway for saving and sharing your files, this added functionality can’t hurt. Because the company requires that you first share your files publicly, there shouldn’t be any privacy concerns here – nobody is going to see your website before it’s finished unless you explicitly give them the link.

Google’s goal here is of course to get more and more people using Google Drive over competing services. If your current cloud storage service can’t do this, we doubt you’ll switch, but if you’re already using Google Drive, you may find yourself using it more than Dropbox or SkyDrive.

See also – Google releases faster version of Forms with real-time collaboration, automatic saving, and more and Google releases Save to Drive extension for Chrome, adds zooming and region commenting to images

Image credit: Pawel Kryj

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