Mosso Inc. wants to bring affordable utility computing to the masses - or at least to web designers and developers. The start-up, which is backed by Rackspace Managed Hosting, has just launched an innovative reseller hosting service that offers unlimited websites, databases and e-mail accounts in a turnkey service for just $100 a month.

Mosso uses a "hosting system" of clusters of specialized servers, an approach typically seen in enterprise hosting, which can offer advantages in redundancy and performance. The company was built from the ground-up as an alternative to discount dedicated servers, which have been enormously popular with hosting resellers and power users.

Mosso's $100 a month reseller account comes with 80 gigabytes of storage space and 2,000 gigs of monthly data transfer. Customer support and billing are available as paid add-ons, allowing customers to outsource both services for just $5 per domain per month. Traffic load balancing and mitigation of denial of service attacks are included in each account, along with the ability to combine Windows and open source technologies on a web site, running ASP and PHP pages from the same web directory. There are significant differences with dedicated server solutions as well, as Mosso offers FTP uploads but not shell or root access.

Google has launched a beta version of a free hosting service, Google Page Creator. The service, which is currently limited to existing users of Google's Gmail, allows users to build a web page using a web-based interface. Each site has its own subdomain, with a web address using the structure of http://gmailname.googlepages.com, and users can choose among up to 40 page designs.

The introduction of Google Page Creator follows the recent launch of free hosting products by Microsoft and Go Daddy. Google is already a major player in the free hosting sector with Blogger, while Yahoo has several free hosting products, including its GeoCities brand. While several of these services are designed to generate revenue from advertising, Google's Page Creator beta doesn't include advertising on either its public pages or administrative interface.

Free web hosting is hot again. Rejuvenated by the growth in online ad spending, free web sites bearing advertising are emerging as the latest battleground between the Internet economy's largest players.

On Wednesday Microsoft launched the beta version of Office Live, its free web hosting service for small business owners who agree to view ads as they maintain their sites. Ad-supported web services are a key ingredient in Microsoft's family of "Live" web services, while Google and Yahoo report strong growth in their existing free hosting programs. That trio is being joined by the domain registrar Go Daddy, which is now offering free ad-supported hosting accounts and blogs with every domain name it sells.

The free hosting ramp-ups by Microsoft and Go Daddy are a response to surging revenue from contextual ads on web sites. In its most recent quarter, Google reported $1.1 billion in advertising revenue from its own sites, and another $799 million from third-party sites using its AdSense program. The rapid growth of domain parking services has also illustrated the earning potential of large portfolios of web pages bearing contextual ads.

After a year of explosive growth, Go Daddy has surpassed 1&1 Internet as the world's largest web host - at least for the moment. With a net gain of 255K hostnames this month, Go Daddy's web infrastructure now houses 5,544,296 hostnames, about 95K more than 1&1, according to our Hosting Provider Switching Analysis. 1&1, which is based in Germany, has had the largest number of hostnames each month since the inception of the hosting survey in early 2003.

The milestone comes as Go Daddy prepares to advertise in Sunday's Super Bowl XL broadcast, which is expected to be seen by a global television audience of more than 90 million. Go Daddy, which will pay $2.5 million for each of two 30-second ads, had 13 of its edgy ad submissions rejected by ABC censors before gaining an approval on Thursday.

Why is Go Daddy so keen on advertising in the Super Bowl again this year? Did the company's controversial 2005 ad really help sell domains and hosting services? The numbers speak for themselves: Go Daddy has experienced powerful growth over the past year, adding 2.5 million hostnames since January 2005. Many of those hostnames represent sales of domain names, products that generate revenue once a year (upon the initial sale and each annual renewal). But domains are an important gateway to the sale of additional services such as web hosting and SSL certificates.

Interland will change its name to Web.com, the company said today as it closed on the acquisition of the domain's owner, hosting provider Web Internet LLC. The name change will take place in the first half of 2006, Interland said, calling the decision "a strategic move designed to clearly align the company with its branded line of business."

The move illustrates the growing importance of branding in mass-market web hosting. As the web's largest hosting companies pursue small business customers, Interland has fallen significantly behind better-known competitors. Interland currently hosts 463K hostnames, down 57K from August, while Go Daddy (+600K hostnames) and Yahoo (+200K) have had huge gains in the same period.