Beware the Ides of March. I just received the news that one of my most favorite services is shutting down due to the cost of providing the free service. That's right, the public g.ho.st cloud desktop service closes on March 15, 2010. I loved the Global Hosted Operating System and realized that it is truly the way of the future. Of course, I understand the need to make money and they were providing a lot of space per person for each user account. They must have had hundreds of thousands of accounts. Still, March 15, 2010 is the end of an era.
Now known as Ghost Cloud Computing, the current owners want to sell out. The following message is the email I received from them a short while ago:
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.
Regards
The Ghost Team
I'm disappointed and shocked.
I wish the Ghost Team well in their new venture and also hope that they'll provide yours truly with an account so that I can review and report on the service like I have so many times in the past in one of my writing venues.
Goodbye Ghost, you were really cool.