I found this to be quiet interesting. Why does http://www.google.com/hosted/life/ redirect to http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/life/?
Disallow: /hosted/life/
I first noticed the /hosted/life/ string in the Google.com robots.txt file, which is always a fun file to look over. So the /hosted/life/ redirects to /a/cpanel/life/, but the /a/ normally means hosted apps. Does this mean that Google is going to be integrating with cPanel® and its Google Apps together to create a more complete web hosting solution?
Google Sites is just one service offered as part of the Google Apps suite, but it’s not very flexible or robust right now.
Integrating cPanel® into the Google Sites service would be a huge added value for users as it would give users a lot more flexibility for software being allowed to be hosted.
Being able to run WordPress on Google Sites would be incredible.
This would open up an entire new can of worms for hosting and create a huge competitor for web hosting providers.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Yeah, no kidding. It would be a new day of Google offered web hosting, and simplified cPanel. Thanks for the good news!
October 27th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
It may not be cpanel, but just short for control panel. Then again, if cPanel is integrated, Google Sites will become an extremely powerful hosting solution. I wouldn’t need to host my blog on my own server!
October 27th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Ajay,
Quite right, it *could* be just “control panel,” or it very well could be a cPanel integration, but who knows at this point.
Jeremy, oh man, it would be killer! They already offer web hosting, but no cPanel as of yet. We’ll see what the future holds :)
October 30th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Jonathan,
This would be AWESOME. Right now, Google Sites are pretty much crap - not that I’m complaining. I actually don’t know why they haven’t done this earlier. I checked out the wishlist from google sites groups, and the majority of the complaints revolved around issues that could probably be solved via cPanel-type functionality.
I think you’re on to something. Great post.
Thanks!
October 30th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
[...] into cPanel before, since it’s at pretty much every hosting company. Well, Jonathon’s Inside Google blogpost uncovered some pretty nifty info the other day -After checking out google’s [...]