One of the leading companies in cloud based computing, Ghost Inc better known as Global Hosted Operating SysTem has hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, making use of this free service to host their files online and access them using an online operating system that can be accessed from any browser, anywhere! We reviewed the website in our post- G.ho.st: A Free Web-based Virtual Computer for Everyone. Recently they moved to a simpler web address Ghost.cc which stands for Ghost Cloud Computing.
Early morning, I received an email from them stating that Ghost would be shutting down its free service. The news came as a shock for me as I have been using their service for more than a year now. They are the best web based OS providers and the hosting space has no limit since you can earn it by inviting friends to use this service. The contents of email are-
Dear Ghost User,
We hope you have been enjoying our free Ghost service. Regrettably changes in the marketplace mean that it is no longer economical for us to host the Ghost service and we will be closing down the service on or around March 15. We will instead be focusing on licensing or selling our technology to larger companies.
We advise you to migrate ALL important folders, files and emails to another secure place before March 15. You might like to consider Google Docs or Microsoft SkyDrive for files and services such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail for email. Some instructions for migrating data are included below.
We are really sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you and are very grateful for the fantastic support we had from our community.
….
Here is a snapshot of the complete email-
Note that, Ghost is now focusing on licensing or selling their technology to larger companies. Ghost users are adviced to back up their data before 15th March. But since the shut down is scheduled around this date, so I will advice you to get a hold of your important data as soon as possible.
The decision to shutdown the service was very much annoying to many users who were using this service, including me. Specially those users who had invited other users to join ghost, just to get extra hosting space, have been slapped on face instead of rewarding them for their hard-work.
CONCLUSION-
The service could have been monetized easily. Providing Premium service without ads and with extra hosting space to users was an option. Putting up some ads within g.ho.st for free users, and on the file download pages that could have easily generated money for them. There were many other ways to earn money from such an awesome website that had gigabytes of data hosted on it.
It was an immature decision from a mature company. What do you think about it?
In case you are used to these online OS, then I recommend Glide OS .
One Comment
I think it’s a real shame that so many people who were users of Ghost were let down like that with the shut down of Ghost services. I agree that they should have charged for their services in order to stay afloat. For that reason, among others, I highly reccomend Icloud. They have a free account with 3gigs of storage but after that, you have to pay to upgrade to a premium account for more storage. That sounds like a much healthier business strategy to me.