An article I read today got me thinking about something. There are lots of very good web services that are free. Enough, in fact, that they can often adequately replace similar paid products, depending on how many features you need of course. Gmail would be the prime example here. I used to pay for an email address, but now Gmail’s free and offers most everything I could want out of an email service, and indeed more than the prior paid service did. Vox and Blogger are other examples. Other blogging utilities offer more flexibility, but the free ones offer enough that you can do quite well with them. I’m not one who wants stuff for free because I’m cheap—I gladly pay for services that I deem worth the money—but at the moment the web is built around the notion that the consumer often doesn’t have to pay anything and the providers get their money from advertising. This isn’t much different than TV or radio.
The thing is, some of us are currently paying for web hosting. I like being able to tinker around with Movable Type, and I like being able to use all the plug-ins and such. I like having that control. But sometimes I also like the simplicity of a hosted service, and well, we all like saving money. The problem is, I have lots of data sitting on my own server and, more importantly, lots of people have links to that data. Neither Vox nor Blogger offer import features (though I think they will in time) but, even if I were to move all of my posts and images over to a free provider, I’d still have to give up all the links that have been going to my current domain. Google juice is currency on the web.
There may be a service out there already that does this, but here’s what I think would be useful: a tiny, cheap web hosting service. Imagine I have one blog I’d like to move over to a hosted service. I’m happy with having the data on another service, and even happy with existing at myname.service.com instead of myname.com, but I don’t want people who’ve linked to me over the years to lose track once I switch over to the new host. What I need is simply a host that provides just enough space for an .htaccess file to redirect stuff to new locations, one index with a profile page that I can customize, and the ability to edit cnames so that I can use services like Google Apps. What I picture is that if you went to myname.com you’d see my profile, maybe my hcard and a photo, and a few links pointing to my blog, my photos, and so on. The .htaccess redirecting could probably even be auto-generated (the ability to edit later on) given a dump of Movable Type post titles and the URL parameters and knowing how Blogger and Vox name their files. Naturally a lot of this requires some technical know-how, but given that the target audience would be people who are currently running websites and want to move to other services, they probably know a little about the stuff already.
I don’t imagine there’s a huge market for a service such as this, but as time goes on and new services come out, people are going to want to be able to move around more.