I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised to see Microsoft discontinue this “feature” for new Office 365 customers after March of 2015.

The reason, according to MS’s support article ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3027254 ):

“After careful consideration, we concluded that for public websites, Office 365 customers would be better served by third-party providers whose core competency is public websites.”

I agree.

Office 365 SharePoint itself is a powerful and robust tool. After implementing a few custom-branded designs on the platform, I was disappointed to find the Public Website  lacking in features and tie-ins compared to its stronger cousin.

Decent developer documentation was also lacking, and even with my knowledge of SharePoint, creating a small public site design took me far longer than designing and producing a similarly-sized site from scratch.  I’ve been advising clients to avoid SharePoint Public and urging them toward WordPress as an easy-to-use, CMS-based option.

It’ll be interesting to see what 3rd party providers and products Microsoft recommends.