I thiiink you could, so long as it was in a limited area where one needed an account to view it, and not freely available to the public. I think that a better way of doing it, though, might be to get a beta reader lined up and just do it privately, either through email, or maybe something like Google Documents. You can use that to give whoever you like access to it, either read-only or with full permission to make changes.
My understanding (and I'm not an editor or a publisher myself but I do have some interest in this myself) is that it counts as published if just anyone can see it on the Internet, but not if, say, you have a writing group that meets in a private forum online. It's more about public access than the technology involved.
I hope that is of some help!
