That's it; $50/year is essentially the total cost of ownership (assuming a 1-user scenario). And so far, I think the answer is a resounding yes, why not; even in its infancy, the OOTB features and Gadget extensibility cover most scenarios. The search, forms, and light-weight WCM capabilities offered by Sites are sufficient for most corporate internet sites.
Surprisingly, Google isn't prepared to push this tangent just yet [1]:
Does Google host websites too? Google Sites is designed to make it easy for employees to create and collaborate on internal sites for their projects, teams and departments. You can also make a public website with Google Sites, but most businesses prefer to go with a traditional web hosting solution for their public sites.
If you're looking for more dynamic or advanced web solutions for your public web site, you may want to run Google Apps in addition to a web host. Any web host that provides the technology or platform you need to run your services should work with Google Apps. Two of our web host partners that register domains are Enom and Go Daddy.
And note that the $50/user fee is for the Premier Edition – you can register up to 50 accounts on the free edition as well. Upgrading to Premier gives you a few benefits, including video, Postini and a variety of service-specific features. Another distinction is the number of mailboxes available under each plan: with Premier, you can still have multiple email addresses without the need to add additional user accounts – this can be done by adding alias addresses to your existing account.
I would suspect that it’s a matter of when and not if the Sites offering matures to the level of specifically targeting internet-site scenarios. Take the Google Maps usage guidelines, for instance:
There is no limit on the number of page views you may generate per day using the Maps API. However, if you expect more than 500,000 page views per day, please contact us in advance so we can provision additional capacity to handle your traffic.
Hosting internet sites requires a level of capacity planning that intranet-usage, mainly by small-medium Google Apps adopters, doesn’t; but once the necessary infrastructure is in place, I would expect this stance to change.
I will be sure to chronicle our journey down this path; in the meantime, here is a link to Brian Johnson of KC Cloud Solutions who is one of the forerunners, helping newcomers sort out some of the quirky limitations in the early version of Google Sites: http://siteshelp.kccloudsolutions.com/.
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