Google "Web Hosting Service" - Unlimited Storage, Web Analytics

Google, an ICANN-accredited registrar of domain names, could soon expand into the web hosting industry. Google is approved to sell names in seven top-level domains (TLDs) including .com, .net, .org, .biz, info, .name and .pro.

Google Web Hosting recently made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects on Google Servers. Wikimedia Foundation are continuing to talk with Google Hosting about creative ways in which they might provide support to the project.

Blogger, a free Google Web Hosting platform already has the largest user base. Google can easily acquire some of the most popular web hosting companies and use it as a base to build a business around. Alternatively, Google could simply buy up tons of customers from smaller hosts.

Web hosting requires tons of servers, data centers, and skilled technical support staff. Google already has all that. Google also acquired Urchin that offers web analytics to customers for free. Most business customers want Email (gmail) and Web hosting (google) from the same company.

Google still doesn't have a free web files hosting platform like Yahoo Geocities or Angelfire or Lycos Tripod. We just hope Google quickly enters the webhosting arena and offers unlimited space like GMail and I am will to see Google Ads in return.

Wishlist for Google Web Hosting Service - Unlimited server storage (GMail), Visitor Tracking (Urchin Or Google Analytics), Site Search (Google), Google Hosting Software for Desktop (like Picassa, GDS), Monetization with Adsense, Domain Parking with Adsense Domains.

If Google offers web hosting, there's little doubt: they will win, if they carry it out as well as they did Gmail. And Web Hosting is ultimately about service. And we all know how famous Google Adsense are for their excellent customer service.

Web Hosting Courtesy Wikipedia - What's the catch ?

"Web hosting service"

Wikia, a sister site of Wikipedia, today announced a free web hosting service called Openserving that will provide absolutely free bandwidth and free web space for hosting your websites.

And you probably guessed it wrong, Wikia won't be serving any advertising on your pages - on the other hand, you can type in your Adsense Publisher code while signing up and the entire advertising revenue will flow into your account.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikia executive Gil Penchina are saying that they haven't thought of any business-model out of Openserving yet. They just want the hosted website to link back to Wikia.com. Pretty reasonable [think Google juice]

So why is Wikia giving away all this for free when it will cost them money for buying all those additional servers, hard disks, power bills, etc ? The one word answer is Youtube.com.

There's a simple connection between Youtube and Wikia's Openserving.com - When Youtube launched, they asked users to upload and share their home video clips with other users via Youtube for free.

The company itself wasn't making any money from these grainy clips but over time, Youtube successfully managed to build a community of millions of users and it reached a point when the entire web became addicted to the "user generated content" stored on Youtube.

That's when Google stepped in with a check of $1.65 billion. It may not require any rocket science to envisage a similar future for Openserving.com.

We are not living in the 1999 era of freebies anymore. But yes, this announcement will not be music to the ears of other hosted wiki platforms or wiki farms that offer ad supported wikis.

Never Use a Web Hosting Server to Backup Data from the Hard Drive

Say you have some 5 GB of critical data (photos, documents, program installers, etc) on an hard drive that you want to save to an offsite location. You can either copy these files to an external hard drive and put it safely in a bank locker or better still, subscribe to any of the web based data backup services.

EMC Mozy, one of the most popular online backup services, charges $4.95 per month for unlimited storage. Rival Carbonite also lets you can store unlimited data for a flat annual fee of $50. Then there’s Amazon S3 where you pay 15¢ per GB of storage space per month plus an additional 10¢ per GB of data transferred (one time fee).

Now compare these rates with that of a web hosting company like Dreamhost where you can rent 500 GB of web server space for $120 per year - apply a $100 discount coupon code and the storage cost works out to be just $20 per year. This seems to be the best option but before you run that rsync utility, read the policy:

"The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Web Hosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website. Data uploaded must be primarily for this purpose; DreamHost Web Hosting servers are not intended as a data backup or archiving service."

Robyn Peterson, chief technology officer for Ziff Davis Media, was looking to store some 250 GB of his personal data online and opted for a web hosting company that offered server space at rates comparable to that of Dreamhost.

The backup process was long but smooth (Robyn is a geek). And then one fine morning, he discovered that all his files have been deleted from the web server without any notification. The tech-support team responded saying that they "have been cracking down on people using our services for backing up files." The data was never recovered.