Ghost Inc., also known as G.ho.st, is shutting down its personal cloud-based services in two weeks, according to an email the company just sent out to users. Ghost cites “changes in the marketplace” as the reason behind the shutdown, but says that the startup will continue to license or sell its technology to larger companies.

The service launched its beta last summer after years of development, allowing users to store their files in the cloud. Files were accessed through a web-based desktop environment, which also included integrated tools like Zoho for editing documents. Users could also access their files through a mounted virtual drive in Windows or from their mobile phones.

Ghost was previously hosted at G.ho.st, which stood for “Global hosted operating system”. The company later moved to the current domain, Ghost.cc, which has the broader tagline, “Cloud Computing”.

Here’s the email the company just sent out to 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.

Note that the message says “on or around” March 15 — hopefully they mean “no earlier than”, but I’d back up my data as soon as possible.

It’s also unclear if Ghost’s unreleased services are being shutdown as well (both “Ghost Enterprise” and “Ghost Business” are marked as Coming soon on the site). I’ve reached out to the company for more details.

Crunchbase

• G.HO.ST

Company: G.ho.st

Website: g.ho.st

Funding: $3M

An acronym for the Global Hosted Operating SysTem, G.ho.st (pronounced “ghost”) is a free virtual computer that hosts all of your data and applications on the web so that they are accessible from any Internet browser and not tied down locally to any one computer. G.ho.st combines multiple web software applications in their virtual computer to provide users with a web desktop, webmail, online file system, 15 GB of storage, single sign in, and sharing. The company...

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