Google India has taken the initiative to provide Small and Medium Businesses with free webhosting , a domain name (.in) and emails for a whole year along with 356 days of free support by announcing the “India Get Your Business Online” program  . The plan is to connect local businesses to the internet by providing them tools, applications and resources which would ultimately allow them to grow.

Google writes in its blog – ” The initiative aims to break down the barriers that stop small businesses from getting online – by offering a quick, easy and free tool to set up and host a website. Our goal is to help 500,000 small medium businesses in India to get online in next three years through this program, with our partner HostGator.

This program is designed to bridge the information gap that exists online due to the lack of presence of local Indian businesses on the Internet. Businesses often believe that getting online is too complex, costly and time-consuming; this perception prevents many SMBs from taking the first step towards building an online presence. ”

The partners to this scheme are Google itself , Hostgator India, ICICI and Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME). The businesses will be able to renew their Hosting right after the one year of free service.

Issue [Fixed] : This issue has been debugged and fixed – ” According to information from various sources, there seems to be a barrier at the first step of Signing up for the account wherein you’ll not be able to validate any domain name as it shows up as “Not Available”.  Also you can skip to the next step by just giving a blank space in the domain name field but this is no solution to the matter.”