(From Website Hosting)

In a recent announcement by Google, it has been declared that it will offer free websites for small and medium size businesses in India. According to this Reuters report, Google has now partnered with HostGator, in order to grant free website maintenance (up to one year) and field names. Once the initially year has passed, businesses will pay a small fee to renew their field names. For those of you who may be unaware of HostGator, it is a provider of web hosting services, with headquarters in Houston, Texas and clients from over 200 countries. The company has done quite well since it’s inception in 2002 and it appears that it is likely to further spread it’s wings with this new Google partnership.
By taking this initiative, Google is attempting to get half a million Indian businesses on the web, within a three year time frame. This seems to be Google’s have a crack to expand India’s internet market to it’s benefit. According to the report, India has approximately 870 million mobile users, though, the ratio of internet users is much lower, i.e. in this area 100 million. Since India is a public of 1.2 billion public, it is the world’s third largest internet market. This goes on to show the potential that India has for companies like Google to invest and expand the existing user base.
This news was revealed in a TechCircle interview with web host Net4India CMD Jasjit Sawhney. In the interview, he claims that among nearly 30 million Indian small businesses, only 400,000 (approximately) have websites. According to Sawhney, email hosting has an even lower number, which makes an vital potential market for service providers.
On the contrary, Google claims that small businesses in India are in fact closer to 8 million. This was clarified in a presentation on Wednesday. Google further clarified that e-commerce was another opportunity for business in India.
No matter what the size of small and medium size business in India maybe, the investment potential seems to be giant, with a change of earning huge profits in the long run. Having said that, this investment is also quite risky and may not yield any results for companies like Google in the small run. Perhaps this is the reason that this Google is making a significant amount of investment to grant free hosting, without any small term revenue expectations from this Indian investment (as mentioned in the report).
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Original: HostGator And Google Join Hands To Offer Free Hosting to Indian Businesses