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Because it's holiday - and business is low this time of the year - I took the time to have a look at some other hosted website solutions. It's amazing how many hosted website solutions there are out there. I'm not going to list them over here, but why don't you search Google for "free website"?
Most of these "free" hosted website solutions have some things in common:
- Their free solution is - in most cases - a limited or even crippled version of a commercial "pro" plan. In other words, "free" basically means: "not yet paying". That is a totally correct and logical business model. Me too, I have been thinking about that. And some of us are building a similar business around QuickerServer.
- Most of these hosted website solutions are built in PHP, they use JQuery (or alike) driven UI's, and are very very good-looking. I'm not sure that makes them easy-to-use in all cases, but looks count these days, for sure. When you compare the basic but functional interface of the QuickerSite backsite, you can ask yourself what we are still doing??? Most of them also have an inline way of editing page and menus. The "control panel" is to be found in a layer on top of the actual website, or in a corner somewhere. In QuickerSite we have a strong line between the public website and the backsite. I prefer that. But it looks like I'm getting lonely here :)
- None of them has adopted Artisteer Web Template Generator. They offer their own designs instead. I must admit that most of these designs are not bad, but integrating with a tool like Artisteer would be so much easier for their users. And in general, Artisteer templates simply look better than their 50 or 60 built-in designs you can choose from.
- Unlike QuickerServer, their hosted website solutions are not for sale. At least, they are not selling it via their website. They mainly use their hosted solution for their own hosting business. I wonder why that is the case. Is it because of security issues to be exposed in case they sell the software? Is it because they fear competition? As far as I see, competition in this market so high already, that one can better focus on bigger fish and sell the hosted cms as such, instead of hosted websites. The only company I know who is doing that is Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder.
- Last but not least: they all claim to host millions of websites. And they all have 100.000's of customers. I personally doubt that.