AnyHosting

Mobile Gmail will soon be using nex-gen (HTML5) browser standards to make network reliability not matter:

Vendor lock-in is a serious concern for any business, and is a pretty tough problem in web hosting specifically.

All of the major control panels like cPanel, Plesk, etc. are licensed at substantial fees, which cut into what you as a web host must charge each user. There are open-source alternatives such as ISPConfig and  GNUPanel, but this of course means that you will be taking on a lot more of the support burden, although you are of course free to make and keep any customizations or enhancements that you like, unlike cPanel or Plesk.

Besides licensing fees, the other snare to recognize is switching costs. As the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack has grown in popularity, it has become quite easy to move from one web host to another. Don’t like DreamHost? Move to Linnode. Don’t like them? Try RimuHosting.

However with the slick new cloud computing services like Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine, there is a ton of opportunity and also some things to watch out for:

• EC2 can run a regular Linux VM, but the management tools and other services like S3 (storage), queueing, billing etc. will not work out-of-the-box elsewhere
• App Engine lets you use the free and open-source Python programming language and the popular Django web framework, but you must use Google’s storage service. It can be used in a very SQL-like way, or hidden behind Django’s ORM however

I am going to continue using both Amazon and Google’s services, but I am being very careful about putting all of my eggs in one basket. There are some impressive updates in the pipeline, but you might want to think twice about letting any one company collect the tolls on your users.

You can read more about vendor lock-in and switching costs at Wikipedia.