G.ho.st – Global Hosting System – announced in the beginning of the month that it will be shutting its services down to its extensive community on March 15, 2010. This comes right after a switch to a new domain located at ghost.cc, and promises of new features. Any where you look, you will find the following message to its users.

Dear Ghost User,

We hope you have been enjoying our free Ghost service. Regrettably changes in the marketplace mean that it is no longer economical for us to host the Ghost service and we will be closing down the service on or around March 15. We will instead be focusing on licensing or selling our technology to larger companies.

We advise you to migrate ALL important folders, files and emails to another secure place before March 15. You might like to consider Google Docs or Microsoft SkyDrive for files and services such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail for email. Some instructions for migrating data are included below.

We are really sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you and are very grateful for the fantastic support we had from our community.

For those unfamiliar with the G.ho.st service, it was an extensive free Web OS. You were granted larger storage space based on referrals – 1GB per successful referred sign up. Being a Web OS, they offered an integrated messenger, email client, mp3 player, office applications (spread sheets, etc.) and many other features that made this the worlds most versatile Web OS.

Reading the G.ho.st forums, you can see that many of the G.ho.st users are unhappy with the decision to shut its services down. Many of whom state that they would gladly pay a premium fee for the service. G.ho.st won’t state whether or not they have already found a buyer for their service, or if it will be permanently commercial. They’ve also started a petition which can be found at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ghostpersonal/

I know that all of the continual users will miss this service, and I hope that when it’s sold, the new owner releases it as a public service – even if it is a paid service.