Google’s App Engine is the first major cloud forming over several key segments of the current landscape . In today’s installment of this multi-part series: hosting. GoDaddy has a very profitable business (paying for Superbowl ads out of cashflow) in large part because many people put relatively small sites on shared hosting, charge it to a credit card and forget about it. Over time GoDaddy’s cost declines but the charges stay the same - voila a profitable account. Many of these sites fall well short of Google’s limits for free (500 MB storage and 5 million page views). Nobody will migrate overnight but for new sites this is attractive and will get more so as third party developers or google make it easier and easier to get up and running. At the low end people are highly unlikely to care about any of the issues that might give others pause, such as the fear of google having access to their data.
