Google Apps is free and is so much better than regular email hosting. I can see a fair amount of my customers who have redirected their MX entries to Google Apps, just for the Gmail web mail interface, compared to the poor Squirrelmail, RoundCube, Neomail or IMP interfaces. The funny thing is that Google Apps is 10x better and it's free of charge, compared to webhosting companies that offer poor email services and that charge.

Now I wonder what would happen if Google did to regular webhosting what they did to Blogger, in other words, give free space, offer to put ads optionally and share the money generated from the ads. Blogger is ad-free but many people activate the ads. I think Google Pages is not the next big thing but Google Hosting, where Google will give 1GB free of space with FTP/SSH access to upload your stuff, a Google control panel and the option to put ads on your page if you want, just like Blogger. And just like Gmail or Google Apps, people will rush to it

Whatcha think?

No, google is not a threat to those offering a service. Nor would they give SSH access.
Nor would there be any support that didn't take a minimum of 72 hours to respond.

You can not have business sites on free hosting accounts... so...

True and more over they would loose their customers from webhosting industry.

Any better service is a thread to a poor service. Improve your stuff and you will be thread to your competitor.

2 cents.

Why not? They already do that for the paid customers of Google Apps (email). We can imagine 24/7 support for paid hosting customers and Google Groups support for free users, like Gmail.

I actually have several medium-sized customers (50+ employees) that migrated this year to Google Apps for their email. And they haven't complained so far.

I don't see why. Being a competitor isn't a reason. There are online advertising companies out there that advertise on Google

there is a trust factor that google lacks from the launch of gmail to what not that trust factor is there so yes some of us might loose jobs but the serious among us will sufface

I'm surprised reading you. Many companies (not just inviduals) rely on Gmail everyday for their business, and although Gmail is still beta, I haven't heard any one complaining (While I have heard all kinds of horror stories from people hosted on regular hosting companies (email server unreachable, IP on blacklist, lots of spam, email interface too slow, etc...).

Then you haven't looked hard enough:

http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail...solving/topics
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c...oblems&spell=1

Don't they already have a limited hosting and make your own site type thing?

I don't see them as a threat. They still would have to face the "big guys". But then again, they do have loads of data center space....

I don't know honestly.

Google is not a threat to the web hosting industry, they will however be a powerful player for pure email hosting.

When it comes to web hosting, there are so many things that Google's "one size fits all"-concept won't append to.

I think if and when google offers something like this it can take away those users who host their sites as a hoby like I have seen people mgrating from blogger to hosting their own blog on their own domain name on a private host.

Looks like they are already coming out with free online storage called the "gDrive".. so maybe it's not that far fetched.

I would say Amazon is;
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=3435361

Unlimited virtual servers, distributed across a server farm, CPU time at 10cents an hour.

Amazon is great for start-ups, as they offer computing power on demand. I don't see Amazon nor Google to take a large market share from the traditional webhosting market though. Amazon will probably affect the companies offering clustered/high availability webhosting.

Google doesn't offer database support, and they probably won't - thus they are "out of the race".