It’s getting mentions all over the tech web. Podcasts are being sponsored and many platitudes are being handed out. But what is the value proposition of Squarespace?

There’s certainly no denying that the technology employed on this next generation web hosting and publishing system is very cool and very powerful. I’ve looked at it like I look at all cool toys – is it just a toy or could I get some real benefit out of this? The two factors I have to consider are cost and functionality.

First of all, cost. The lowest cost plan from Squarespace is ‘Basic’ at USD$8 per month. It offers 1Gb of space and 75Gb of bandwidth per month. On the face of it, my shared hosting service gives me a better deal with 10Gb of space and 50Gb of bandwidth per month for $6.95, but in reality, I don’t use much of that at all. Here’s the difference: I’m close to using 1Gb of space with the 15 domains I currently host. That would seem to be a fairly good fit for the 1Gb plan – except it’s 15 domains! Using Squarespace, that would be $120 per month for 15Gb – way more expensive. As it is I still have a ton of room for expansion on any number of domains and the price never goes above $6.95 unless my traffic skyrockets.

Secondly, functionality. For my ZK-ARJ site, I searched high and low for a packaged photo gallery to meet my needs. None did. So I went with Flickr, fronted by a WordPress blog.  I pay $24.95 a year, or a little over $2 a month for Flickr Pro, so let’s round up my monthly costs to $9. The photo module in Squarespace looks to be the same old story. Beautifully implemented, I don’t doubt, but still stuck on the idea that a photo belongs in exactly one place. Now I have yet to properly implement my vision, but I will eventually have ‘multi-homed’ photos available through my site. Squarespace does not allow functionality to be customised – you have to stick with what they decide to provide, and that is based on what the masses want.

Skipping back to value for a moment, I have about 2,000 photos on Flickr totalling over 1Gb of space. This can grow at an infinite rate for the $2 per month I pay them.

Several of my other sites are far more simple and could easily be transferred to Squarespace with minimum effort, but a big jump in costs. If any one site really gets super-popular I will consider moving it to Squarespace because they do offer good traffic limits at a reasonable price and their infrastructure is supposed to be rock solid. Other sites, and some that are still ideas, would simply not be possible in the Squarespace infrastructure.

My views and my situation will certainly not apply to everyone. I’m a bit of a hacker by nature and think nothing of manually installing WordPress and editing raw PHP, HTML and CSS as required. That’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But for me, as exciting as Squarespace looks, there’s really no value proposition.