"Another one bites the dust."I only discovered by chance that Google Drive webhosting functionality is to be shut down by Google.
It was from here:
Google Starts Deprecating Web Hosting Support In Google Drive | TechCrunch(Copied below
sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Posted Aug 31, 2015 by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)
One of the lesser-known features of Google Drive has always been its ability to host basic web sites for free. If you only found out about this from the preceding sentence, you now have one year to enjoy this tool. Google today announced that it will deprecate the web hosting service starting today and will turn it off completely on August 31, 2016.
The company says that in the time since it launched this feature three years ago, “a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged,” so it has decided to discontinue the feature in order to focus on the core user experience in Drive. That’s been the standard reason for Google to deprecate services lately, but it’s still a bit of a surprise that the company would turn off hosting support.
For now, you can still use Drive to host basic sites that only need a few JavaScript resources and CSS files. You can’t use any server-side scripting tools, of course, but Drive has always been a useful service for quickly putting up a basic site. It even offers an API for developers.
Google itself, of course, offers Google Sites as part of its Google Apps for Work package as an alternative. It feels like it’s been a while since Sites got any major update, though, and it doesn’t quite offer the same flexibility when hosting your own sites.
It’s worth noting that others, like GitHub, for example, have long offered a very similar service. In addition, you can also use Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, Dropbox and a number of other services for hosting basic sites.
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The source was Google Apps Develpers'Blog:
Deprecating web hosting support in Google Drive(Copied below
sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Monday, August 31, 2015 | 10:22 AM
Labels: Google Drive
Posted by Dan McGrath, Product Manager, Google Drive
Beginning August 31st, 2015, web hosting in Google Drive for users and developers will be deprecated. You can continue to use this feature for a period of one year until August 31st, 2016, when we will discontinue serving content via googledrive.com/host/[doc id].
In the time since we launched web hosting in Drive, a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged. After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue this feature and focus on our core user experience.
For those who have used Drive to host websites, Google Domains can refer you to third parties for website hosting functionality.
For those who use this feature to serve non-user content to web and mobile applications, Google Cloud Platform offers a better-performing solution.
Definition: "deprecate" = a new ambiguous and clichéd euphemism to be used at all times in place of anything remotely specific but especially including such as "shut down", "terminate", "kill off", "remove (life) support".
Never to be used in the same sentence with "excited".
Avoid confusion with "depreciate", "deprecatingly", "decapitate".
Usage: "the terrorist was deprecated with prejudice after decapitating his prisoner", or "we deprecated 2,000 of our personnel today as a cost-cutting measure", "the HR manager responsible for hiring the unabomber onto the corporate payroll has been deprecated", "we deprecated the solar generation plant as it had depreciated to zero with no residual value".
- Source: Grooglespeak vocab and labelling guidelines (2015) © Groogle SpinWriting Corp. AL.