What if Google offered free hosting?
Already Google are offering Gmail accounts at your own domain (still in beta) so it’s not unfeasible that they would offer free hosting (they already have Google Pages … which is a form of free hosting) at your own domain.
Would it wipe out shared hosting companies? Are we in hosting365 investing in other businesses to hedge our bets against this day?
In short - NO.
Unfortunately shared hosting is very commoditised - hence we offer plans from 3.75 a month - so yes, Google offering FREE versions of those plans would seem tempting. However virtually all customers need some kind of support - and a knowledgebase / FAQ just doesn’t cut it. No business will or should trust their on-line presence to a hosting vendor that does not provide dedicated support resources. And nothing in Google’s other product ranges would suggest that they would offer support - it’s just too costly.
Perhaps my view is naive since I’m in the hosting business, but I don’t fear Google offering free hosting, unless they also offer free, freephone support and email ticketing, 24×7. FREE and MANAGED SERVICES are not two phrases commonly associated with the same product. While we do provide a free blog plan (and support it mind you!), and maybe some day will offer free basic hosting - no business customer will (at least no one who values their web site or email) trust their on-line presence to a company they can’t get help from - no matter how reliable the uptime may be - the support required for individual web site issues is critical.
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Google Base can do hosting.
Hi Damien … from what I can see Google Base only hosts content and there’s loads of free content hosting / wiki sites around. I suppose it it’s only a small bit of content you want to put on-line then one of those services are fine.
Its the forms of free hosting that push prices down with hosting companies. That is undisputable. Of course the dedicated support is nice to have and should always be available. But there are other ways to pay for it other than a flat monthly fee. They could offer the use of premium adwords on sites whereby they take an increased take from the click through traffic to help fund a support service.
I think personally that its a bit arrogant\overconfident for a hosting company to assume that the existing business model for paying for support would always be their one, of a fixed monthly fee, especially when a basic hosting package costs as little as €3.75. One would imagine that a major corporation like Google could easily offer enterprise level hosting to small and medium sized organisations quite easily.
I don’t think it’s arrogant (of course!) that a professional service firm thinks people will always pay for there professional services. Sorry … I should probably explain better what I mean, we consider ourselves to be a business solution provider - rather than a pure infrastructure one.
On the infrastrucutre side, sure Google et al could offer entry level hosting to SME’s - but would they offer the level of service and solutions, or just provide the platform?
The other side is, of course Google, or any major corporation could go into the hosting business .. but it would be a large departure from their business model .. and professional firms require dedicated support and sales resources, not just free online service and support forums.
Agreed about the need that professional firms need that dedicated support but its not a million miles from Googles current activity.
They already provide successful support and sales resources for their adwords division. My opinion is that with this foundation, building a support and sales team dedicated to hosting would be quite a natural extension to their current activities and not totally impossible to imagine if coupled with their existing free analytics service.
http://www.maluke.com/blog/amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-ec2
Works out at 290 dollars a month for a server with similar specs to our Value Series that costs 59.95 a month.
Usage based model is interesting though … we’ve often talked about virtualised infrastructure and usage based pricing … will be interesting to see where this goes. Like Google Base though … it’s really only for techies.
Google are doing hosting:
Google Apps for Your Domain, an expansion of the Gmail for Your Domain
service that launched in February 2006, currently includes Gmail web
email, the Google Talk instant messaging and voice calling service,
collaborative calendaring through Google Calendar, and web page design,
publishing and hosting via Google Page Creator. Domain administrators
use a simple web-based control panel to manage their user account list,
set up aliases and distribution lists, and enable the services they
want for their domain. End users with accounts that have been set up
by their administrator simply browse to customized login pages on any
web-connected computer. The service scales easily to accommodate
growing user bases and storage needs while drastically reducing
maintenance costs.
Ed
There’s always been free versions of commercial solutions, but that comes at a price -which has been well discussed elsewhere- Why buy SAP when I believe that I can get the same result with free applications? The problem, is with the “I believe” bit, of course.
What Googleapps does for the that marketplace is to educate and validate. More and more people are going to try the free versions (I did, when gpages came out) which allows you to see the possibilities and achieve buy-in. They won’t necessarily stay with the free version (I didn’t) and will be well placed to learn why a commercial solution is better.
For some years I have been telling hosters to start adding applications to their portfolios and have been very surprised at the low takeup. With Googleapps, that will change for sure.
Chris.
Hi Chris,
I totally agree with everything you said there!
GoogleApps et al are a blessing in disguise for the hosting industry … educating the market is an expensive marketing task … so if Google can do it, and then a small percentage of people realise they need more professional services and pay for them - then great!
Free Trials are also a great way to get people on board to see the value of your service - we do 30 day automatic-money-back plans, which aren’t as good as free trials I agree, but we also do a free blog plan, which lets you try out our hosting service - control panels, reliability and support service.
Applications are the way to go … we are moving that way in here, as are other hosters, and from an industry perspective, Google, MS and Amazon heating up the competition is only a good thing for the consumer, and ultimately, I believe for hosting365 too!
even if your competitors, google or otherwise, offered free hosting or the decent kind with databases etc, I;d stay with 365 for your control panel alone, I know its only a turnkey hsphere, but its so logical, please never change control panels
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