Andrew Cherry - The Cherry Pit ... 'cuz life's like a bowl of cherries?

Boy has Dreamhost put an expiration date on their long term business viability!

They have taken what is seemingly good idea for their bottom line in terms of support and maintenance of mail server services, and have just sold themselves out of one of the most important aspects of the hosting business ( and most any subscription-based service businesses)...... VENDOR LOCK-IN!!

I'm not saying that I'm a proponent of vendor lock-in, who as a customer is? But as a service provider, the more your customers are tied and dependent to your service, the more likely that the comfort zone of maintaining the status-quo will keep them as your customer.

For many organizations, mail services and mail data have got to be one of the primary factors that keep them with their current providers. Migrating data, accounts etc... is an expensive endeavor.

Personally, as a Dreamhost customer who has used the automatic google Apps for your Domain setup on the dreamhost panel, I thought the feature was great.... given that I never used dreamhosts mail servers anyway and have been using gmail (and calendar and...) for some time.

But purely looking at this as a business decision, it's a horrible move. There is reason that Google is offering mail services for free. To keep you as a captive audience. There will be a time when hosting all your mail data will reap great rewards (keep an eye on your TOS ppl!)

The expression that comes immediately to mind to characterize the future of the internet business model is.... "All your data are belong to us!"
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