Google is deprecating discontinuing support for those who host websites on Google Drive, a little known feature that has been available for three years, but one that has definitely caused issues.

“Websites” had been hosted via Google Drive with a googledrive.com/host/[doc id] address, but that left plenty of room for some confusion when it came to spammers and phishers setting up their own sites on Google Drive.

The grace period before Google will stop offering the service is a year, so there is plenty of time for those who are using Google Drive as hosting to transfer to another webhost or similar service.  In the meantime, Google suggests those affected consider moving to either a service through Google Domains or Google Cloud Platform, depending on the application.

This change shouldn’t be much of a surprise for those who have followed Google Drive over the years.  Many actually expected webmasters to lose the ability to “host” websites via Google Drive before now, primarily after a Google phishing scam to get Google user’s login credentials used a scam Google login page that was hosted right on Google Drive, fooling many people who saw the Google domain to believe the login was legitimate.

Doing a site:googledrive.com with any number of often spammed keywords such as viagra show plenty of spam pages hosted on Google Drive, many complete with fake reviews to show the ratings markup for their search results.  While these pages can be reported, it has been an ongoing problem.

Google Drive’s hosting will be deprecated in a year, on August 31, 2016.