NEWS

Google is more inclined to be the repository of consumer data with each release it announces.

The beta launch today of Google Page Creator adds personal pages to the hosted offerings from the search Goliath.

Google already hosts blogs through its Blogger service; photos via Picasa; e-mail sent to Gmail accounts; video uploaded to Google Video; and all sorts of miscellaneous files uploaded to Google Base.

Now, here comes Google Page Creator, a free, browser-based tool for creating Web pages that are stored by Google.

The WYSIWYG interface eliminates the need to know HTML. Users need a Gmail account to begin building pages, which will be accessible to others at a URL that begins with the Gmail user name.

Google Page Creator is available via Google Labs, but demand was so high that the company already has a waiting list for registration.

Google Page Creator follows Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces in the personalization niche that both Yahoo and MSN offer. Both personal publishing and communication services can be linked and accessed from one place. Page Creator is the second Google service to link to another; the company recently linked Gmail and the Google Talk messaging applications.

PowerSurge Web Hosting Celebrates 10 Years of Hosting

Chicago, Illinois - (Cheap Web Hosting Directory) - February 23, 2006 - One of the very first web hosting providers in the world, PowerSurge Technologies, is celebrating its 10th anniversary of operations with gifts to its clients.

PowerSurge Technologies has announced that it will begin offering an unprecedented number of new value-added services to its customers for no charge, in celebration of its tenth year in operation.

David Wieland, CEO of PowerSurge said, ''We've been very lucky to have managed to stay prosperous and ahead of the curve in this cut-throat industry. Our clients have been nothing but amazing and we look forward to ten more years of earning their business.''

The seven new free value-added services that PowerSurge began to offer its customers include:

** Mambo CMS, one of the most powerful Content Management Systems available today

** Xoops CMS, an extensible, Object Oriented, easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP, ideal for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more

** WordPress Blog, a state-of-the-art semantic personal blog publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability

** b2evolution Blog, a multilingual multiuser multi-blog engine that includes almost any feature you could expect from a blog tool and more

** phpWiki WikiWikiWeb, a web site where anyone can edit the pages through an HTML form and wherel inking is done automatically on the server side while all pages are stored in a database

** osCommere E-Commerce Solution, the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality allowing store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved, and

** Coppermine Photo Gallery, a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend.

Mr. Wieland added, ''We're nothing short of thrilled to be able to offer these new value added services along side our national award winning support and service.''

PowerSurge was founded in the Waterloo, Iowa area in 1996 and quickly grew to be one of the nation's largest and most prominent web hosting and design companies.

To learn more about PowerSurge, please visit: www.powersurge.com/anniversary.

Netcraft, UK - Feb 17, 2006

Free web hosting is hot again. Rejuvenated by the growth in online ad spending, free web sites bearing advertising are emerging as the latest battleground between the Internet economy's largest players.

On Wednesday Microsoft launched the beta version of Office Live, its free web hosting service for small business owners who agree to view ads as they maintain their sites. Ad-supported web services are a key ingredient in Microsoft's family of "Live" web services, while Google and Yahoo report strong growth in their existing free hosting programs. That trio is being joined by the domain registrar Go Daddy, which is now offering free ad-supported hosting accounts and blogs with every domain name it sells.

The free hosting ramp-ups by Microsoft and Go Daddy are a response to surging revenue from contextual ads on web sites. In its most recent quarter, Google reported $1.1 billion in advertising revenue from its own sites, and another $799 million from third-party sites using its AdSense program. The rapid growth of domain parking services has also illustrated the earning potential of large portfolios of web pages bearing contextual ads.

The focus on free hosting recalls the dot-com boom years of 1995-99, when GeoCities, Tripod, AngelFire and Homestead built massive communities by giving away free web space. The business model took a hit from the dot-com collapse and declining effectiveness of untargeted banner ads. Several hosts introduced pop-ups and other intrusive ad formats, which soon quickly became unpopular with users. The rise of text ads related to a page's content has revived the outlook for free hosting. But will the new focus on free hosting disrupt the paid hosting market?

As director of hosting products at Yahoo, Guy Yalif has a unique vantage point on this question. In Jan. 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities in an all-stock deal valued at $3.5 billion at the time. Yahoo doesn't break out the exact number of web sites hosted on GeoCities, but they account for a significant chunk of a hosting operation that spans 30 million web sites and 50 terabytes of data, according to Yalif, who calls GeoCities "one of the most recognized brands online."

Yalif says the free hosting clients often have different needs than paid hosting prospects - but not always. "A decent chunk of GeoCities users will never upgrade to paid hosting," said Yalif. "They're happy where they are, and they don't mind the ads.

"But there's also a large number who are experimenting and learning about managing a web site," he said. "We get a healthy number of customers who have grown beyond the free plan and don't want the ads. The (hosting sales) funnel begins with domains and web hosting, but there's almost a separate funnel from free hosting to paid hosting." Of course, Yahoo also gets revenue from the ads displayed on GeoCities. "The income is nice," Yalif admits.

Microsoft's Office Live offers a free domain with hosting to users of its Basic service a free service which includes a domain name, 30 megabytes of storage, five e-mail accounts and traffic analysis software. There are no ads on the public web sites, but contextually-relevant ads will appear on the site the owner uses to maintain and update their web pages.

Go Daddy's free ad-supported hosting accounts offer 50 megabytes of web space, a 5-page Web site builder, and the ability to add photos and graphics to professionally designed templates. Go Daddy's free accounts display Google ads and links to Go Daddy services in a frame above the customer content.

Posted by Rich Miller at February 17, 2006 07:45 PM