A call to Google
I’ve been reading and investigating recently about Amazon’s new hosting services. Their storage solution seems to be really slick and their new computing solution looks to be really hot as well. So, what I would like is for you, Google, to make a competitive offering. With your incredible infrastructure surely this would not be an overly difficult task.
To be more specific, here is what I suggest:
Step One — Have a mass storage solution. Amazon is charging .15 a gig and .20 a gig for bandwidth. Surely you can match or even beat that. Perhaps offer a sliding scale for really large usages (especially for the bandwidth). This is so painfully obvious it is amazing you don’t offer it already. With your current architecture and infrastructure this is a no brainer. Put a service on top of your file system and presto, instant customers.
Step Two — Have a solid web hosting offering. This is where Amazon is really suffering right now. They have a cool way of deploying new server instances, but they do not offer any persistant storage for those servers. Yea you get 160gb of disk space, but if that server stops, poof your data is gone. This is fine if you intend to build just a computing cloud for things like scientific work, but for the vast majority of everyone, it doesn’t do much good. Let’s face it, if you offered a means of instantiating new instances that can access persistant storage, that means you can have databases, the backbone of what most people are going to want. Don’t come up with some hoky quasi-SQL solution like what has been suggested on Amazon’s forums, just a simple means of allowing a database.
Don’t forget that you have to allow more than one configuration. Right now Amazon has one ‘hardware’ config. 1.7gb of RAM, 160gb hdd and a 1.7g CPU. The HDD space isn’t that big of a deal, but the memory is. Allow options for up to 4-6 gig of RAM for those who need it for database servers. The CPU wouldn’t be that big of a deal because the whole idea is to have a clustering type of solution anyway. What Amazon is doing right is allowing you to install whatever you want (from what I understand), namely Java. Yes, you need this and it shouldn’t be that big of a stretch because you have a ton of Java developers anyway.
Benefits:
The benefits for all of this are obvious I think. You would have every startup beating on your door to host their solutions. It would save fund-strapped companies tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware costs. Need proof? Go read this post by the SmugMug CEO, who is using Amazon’s storage solution. He has saved several hundred thousand in less than a year in hardware costs. I’ll bet there are a wealth of startup ideas out there that haven’t passed the idea stage because of the daunting prospect of needing the funds for hardware alone. I personally am one of those individuals by the way. A co-worker and I recently did a comparison of what our company spent for hardware for a relatively simple web application solution. They spent approximately $20,000 in hardware. That may not be much, but if they went with something like what Amazon is offering at their prices, that 20k would get spread out over 13 years. 13 YEARS!
Now as the SmugMug CEO points out, he is paying more per gig of bandwidth with Amazon than he does for the pipes he currently has, but depending on the business model this could be a non-issue for a lot of companies. Or once they got more profitable they could move around their hosting architecture. Of course if you offered a tiered bandwidth solution, that would be make it even more of a win.
OK, so Amazon beat you to the punch. However, you have brand loyalty, recognition and trust. While it is great that Amazon is offering this, it is a departure from their core business. I don’t think people would see you doing this as a departure for you guys, not to mention that you could pitch all of your other services to your customers as well (GMail, docs, groups, checkout, etc.) which would perhaps allow you to come in at better prices than Amazon.
Besides, let’s face it the geek world absolutely loves you, wall street loves you (congrats on the record high today), and those who need a hosting solution that could truly scale quickly would definately turn to you.
So, to recap, offer a storage and hosting solution comparable to Amazon’s with matched or better pricing and better options. I’m sure you have plans for that monster facility you are building, but perhaps you can find some room in there for an offering like this one. I know I would buy.
P.S. Does it help any that I own a few shares? 
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