Google's New Web Site Hosting Service Overwhelmed

Google Inc. on Thursday temporarily suspended signing up new accounts for its Web site hosting service due to heavy demand.

The Mountain View, Calif., search engine, which launched Google Page Creator this week, created a waiting list of people's email addresses.

"Due to heavy demand, we are unable to offer new accounts for today," Google said on the Page Creator site.

The new service includes online tools that can arrange text, images or other types of Web content within pre-built templates in a variety of styles. A person builds the pages within his Web browser in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get environment.

To use the service, a person must have a Google account and a Gmail address. The latter is Google's Webmail service. Pages are uploaded by a single click, and the URL includes a person's Gmail user name, i.e. http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com.The service has a 100MB limit for pages and uploaded files. The tools are recommended for people who want to build simple, static Web sites, not e-commerce or interactive sites. For people who plan to update their pages regularly, then the company recommends the use of its online blogging service, Blogger.