I've used GAE (Google App Engine) a fair bit myself too. I think that new startups are well served by GAE for a couple reasons, with some caveats. Easy deploy

I've used GAE (Google App Engine) a fair bit myself too. I think that new startups are well served by GAE for a couple reasons, with some caveats. Easy deploys - you just upload a war file and you're done. Also, the versioning works pretty well, so you can have multiple versions of your app live at the same time and switch on the fly. Access to message queues - those are actually very useful. You can send stuff off to queues fairly trivially and it'll get processed as needed with retry and timeout options. The scaling advantages are overstated for startups - if you need unlimited horizontal scaling, either your app is horribly inefficient or you're already making enough money to write a simple scaling infrastructure. The caveats are that the datastore is really nice (pretty much megastore), but if you use it, you'll have a hard time migrating to another service provider. As for limited funds, GAE is actually fairly expensive as it's PaaS versus IaaS, but if you're a startup and speed is of the essence, it'll let you get something out there in front of consumers very quickly for very low up-front and fixed costs.