Its too early for you to need to scale, but it seems to me that a service like App Engine eliminates: 1- The cost. Right off the bat you're spending $1,700 th

Its too early for you to need to scale, but it seems to me that a service like App Engine eliminates: 1- The cost. Right off the bat you're spending $1,700 that would probably cost you nothing if you hosted it with google. 2- The administration time - why spend any time configuring or administering servers? It doesn't benefit the product when you get this essentially for free. 3- The concerns about security, reliability, single point of failure issues, etc. These may not be critical now, but eventually they will be important and that means you'll have to move. Why not start on App Engine where this is taken care of? 4- Scalability. Again, not something you need now, but rather than re-architect your site and move it later, why not use App Engine from the beginning? From my perspective, App Engine is such a compelling value proposition that there's no reason not to build your site there. If google somehow becomes untenable, you can host app engine sites on unix using open source software.... and the appengine SDK is open sourced itself. So you're not locked in, other than the "lockin" of providing free service until you get big and a great platform.