As I was playing a few games with my son I was looking at his old PlayStation device in looking at the memory cards plugged into the device that used to hold all of his user data. I started thinking that there were probably come a time, when gamers would have to hold us in an amount of information online in that posting this information would become more of an issue.

Nintendo actually provides the service for free. I have to wonder however of someday this will become more of a hosted option is not free. Could there ever be a situation where a person would want to self host their gaming information?

It could become a useful scenario when people need to ensure that their information is secure or when they need more personal control over their information. It’s probably that last item that would make this somewhat useful if a person needs to do some hands-on programming to a character or avatar. It could be akin to keeping your information in a bank account except for the hosting plan would be your bank account. That safe place where you control the voluble information you need to store.

For games today it is really isn’t much of an issue because games are just games. But as gaming platforms gets more intense and become more realistic I suspect it will definitely start to translate into real world situations where their importance is significantly higher and the need to retain control over the information will also be higher. Years ago, many people used to use free accounts hosted by large corporations to do things online. Since then many people have started to gravitate away from those free environments and pay for hosting themselves because it makes practical sense. But they could come in the same transition takes place for gamers.

It is not here today, but someday in the future, you might buy an Xbox 360 or an Xbox 900 maybe, that comes with a free 1 year hosting plan for your user information…

Would it be possible to host a simple website (maybe a half dozen pages or even a landing page) on an external hard drive such as the Western Digital My Book Essential Edition?

I was looking at the actual unit at Best Buy the other night, even though they didn’t necessarily seem to have the ‘best buy‘ on the actual unit. 

Sometimes it helps to get your hands on the actual device and get some perspective on how it might be used.

This particular unit is designed to function as a hard drive that can be accessed through a home network.  It plugs into an ethernet port such as you might have on a wireless router.  You can then access the drive through the router.

But the novelty is that you can also access the drive through the internet.  It comes with a terabyte of storage, but no processor.

That lack of a processor may make the concept unfeasible.

Regardless, I think I’m going to give it a spin.  I’ve seen some software programs (designed for computers) that might actually be deployed with this device and make this possible, we’ll see….