I got frustrated trying to share simple HTML projects, so I built a tool to host them instantly without deploying.

Karthik — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:08:01 +0000

Hey everyone! I’m a 19-year-old student, and I kept running into the exact same annoying problem: trying to quickly share a small static web project (HTML/CSS/JS) with a friend or test it on my phone.

Zipping it up and sending it over Discord is clunky, and setting up a whole GitHub repo just to link it to Vercel or Netlify feels like way too much effort for a 5-minute homework assignment or a quick CSS test. So, as a side project, I decided to just build my own solution called RunZip.

The concept is incredibly simple: you just drag and drop a .zip file of your project onto the screen. The server instantly extracts it, finds your index.html, and gives you a live public URL and a QR code so you can scan it on your phone immediately. No account required, no login screens, no git commands.

Because I’m hosting this completely for free on Render, I had to be careful about running out of disk space. I ended up making the whole platform strictly ephemeral. Every project you upload is automatically wiped from the server after exactly 10 minutes by a background cron job. It's essentially "Snapchat for web hosting."

I built the backend using Node.js and Express, and I even wrote a custom DOM injector using Cheerio so the server can safely inject a little "Share" timer badge into the hosted pages.

I’d love for you guys to test it out, try to break it, or look at the code!

Live Demo: https://runzip.onrender.com
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/rvkarthik579/runzip

Let me know what you think!

DEV Community: Karthik

I got frustrated trying to share simple HTML projects, so I built a tool to host them instantly without deploying.