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I agree with most of what you said, except for the Google App Engine part. The App Engine free quotas are great (Python support and free quotas are basically th

I agree with most of what you said, except for the Google App Engine part. The App Engine free quotas are great (Python support and free quotas are basically the main reasons why I chose App Engine). The App Engine free quotas allow you to operate at zero cost while still getting (on an app that accesses the datastore a couple times every page) about 1-2 million pageviews a month (not as much as the 5 million Google advertises, but it's still pretty darn good). Now I don't know how long the free quotas will last, but with the amount of traffic that support, revenue isn't an issue when starting out.

lsc 16y ago
eh, I know at least one small, revenue free startup that is in to app engine for a grand a month hosting fees. (If you own your own equipment, a grand a month supports maybe 100Mbps and around 10 sockets. 20 if you find someone who doesn't rip you on the bandwidth, but that's hard.) /if/ you could buy app engine compatible service from more than one company, it would be great; it's just that googles current model with app engine /can/ result in some rather high costs (either re-writing your code to run off of google, or paying through the nose) once you reach a certain threshold. Now, for some things, that's fine. It would be perfectly acceptable for my business model, for instance, for me to do the signup page and account management stuff on app engine. everyone who sees that stuff is paying me. but there are many business models for which it's current price structure is not very good, namely if you plan on being both big and free, it is not suitable. the real problem, I think, is how difficult it is to move off app engine. If you are doing something in your own VPS, it's fairly trivial to move to another provider, or to your own hardware if you need to scale and save some money. this, I'm given to understand, is /much harder/ if you built for the app engine platform.

lsc 16y ago

eh, I know at least one small, revenue free startup that is in to app engine for a grand a month hosting fees. (If you own your own equipment, a grand a month supports maybe 100Mbps and around 10 sockets. 20 if you find someone who doesn't rip you on the bandwidth, but that's hard.) /if/ you could buy app engine compatible service from more than one company, it would be great; it's just that googles current model with app engine /can/ result in some rather high costs (either re-writing your code to run off of google, or paying through the nose) once you reach a certain threshold. Now, for some things, that's fine. It would be perfectly acceptable for my business model, for instance, for me to do the signup page and account management stuff on app engine. everyone who sees that stuff is paying me. but there are many business models for which it's current price structure is not very good, namely if you plan on being both big and free, it is not suitable. the real problem, I think, is how difficult it is to move off app engine. If you are doing something in your own VPS, it's fairly trivial to move to another provider, or to your own hardware if you need to scale and save some money. this, I'm given to understand, is /much harder/ if you built for the app engine platform.