One of the questions I frequently find myself pondering is why Google doesn’t offer high grade web hosting, either traditional web hosting or in-the-cloud hosting like Amazon S3.
They certainly have the know-how, they would seemingly have the resources, you would think they could offer the lowest bandwidth prices with their size and scale. They also offer several web hosting-like services such as Google Web Applications and Blogger. For a video startup such as ours, we’d certainly like to have Google as an option for our hosting needs.
The answer is simple… they are having a very challenging time keeping up with their own internal demands for hosting, hardware and bandwidth, and the massive demands coming from the likes of YouTube and GMail. I postulate this from two separate conversations I’ve had with Google employees.
It makes sense – we are all used to the instant access availability and reliability that is manifested by all Google services. How many times have you not been able to reach Google’s homepage or YouTube?
Only Google knows the true extent of this challenge and we can only ponder on the idea that… behind closed doors… Google is in a never ending fight to keep up with all the demand. One employee told me that there is often conflict internally over where to assign resources, and which services to promote (on the Google homepage). For some reason you just don’t think this could be an issue.
So the next time you think… why doesn’t Google do this? or that? The answer may just be… they need to build another data centre!