The difference is much lower if you run the App Engine request a second time. The first time you run it, it needs to spin up an instance which can take some tim

The difference is much lower if you run the App Engine request a second time. The first time you run it, it needs to spin up an instance which can take some time. If I run it a second time I get 770ms for bitballoon and 955ms for App Engine, which is much less significant. Also, running the test from my local computer, app engine wins out presumably because Google's network is basically unmatched when it comes to proximity to your users. Additionally, if you actually define your static files as static, then it doesn't even need to spin up instances to serve them. I've certainly had my criticisms of App Engine in the past, and for certain workloads it's not appropriate [1], but for mostly read only websites like blogs, news, landing pages, I even run a forum on app engine, it's perfect. In fact, that blog post where I complain about the cost of app engine for hosting my game is itself hosted on app engine. It cost me 6c the day it hit the front page of hn. I pay more for the domain than I do for app engine hosting. [1]: http://www.war-worlds.com/blog/2013/06/switched-away-from-app-engine-couldnt-be-happier http://www.war-worlds.com/blog/2013/06/switched-away-from-ap...