What changed in 2016
Until 2016, a public Drive folder could serve its HTML files as a website at a googledrive.com/host address. Google announced the end on 31 August 2015 and switched it off a year later. Google’s reason: “a wide variety of public web content hosting services have emerged”.
Tutorials and videos that still show those steps describe a feature that is gone. Follow them today and you end up with a file to download.
What Google offers instead
Google’s reminder pointed people with static pages to Firebase Hosting, a developer service you set up from the command line.
For one page without developer tools, Google Sites can embed it. Open a site, select Insert, then Embed, then “Embed code”, paste the file’s HTML and select Publish (Google’s steps). The page then appears inside a page of your site, at the site’s address.
Send it as a page link
If the file is in Drive, select it and choose Download, so you have the HTML file on your computer. Drop it on the upload page and sign in: the file uploads, and HTMLRadar gives you a link. Send that link by e-mail or chat. It opens as the page in any browser, on a phone too.
HTMLRadar takes one self-contained HTML file, up to 30 MB. Images kept as separate files beside it do not show, so embed them in the file first.
Choose who can open it
In the link’s settings, under “Who can open it?” choose “Only people I list” and enter each reader’s address in “People and companies”. Under “What readers do before it opens”, choose “Enter their e-mail and confirm it with a code”, then press Create link. Only those inboxes get a code, so only those readers can open the page.
For a password instead, follow the password guide. To change the page after sending, update it on the same link.