February 23, 2006 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Internet giant Google officially launched the beta of a new service on Thursday that allows users to build Web pages to be hosted by Google.
The new service, the Google Page Creator (pages.google.com) is being made available to users of Google’s Gmail email service, and pages created by users will be displayed at subdomains of the URL googlepages.com using the Gmail user name of the site creator, in the format username.googlepages.com.
The Page Creator lets users build Web pages in a word processor-like Web browser interface using either Internet Explorer 6.0 or Firefox 1.0.
With the tool, users can create multiple pages and link them together, using up to 100MB of storage on the site. They can upload pictures and other files as well.
Some observers speculate that the new offering from Google may turn out to be part of a larger set of office tools. The company owns Blogger, a free service for creating and hosting weblogs, and it recently began experimenting with using Gmail technology to provide hosting using a customer’s own domain.
By midday Thursday, Google had posted a message on the site saying that due to the high initial demand, it was unable to immediately fill every request for an account. The company is currently accepting applicaitons for accounts, and will be distributing them as they become available.
