

Google App Engine: Google's monthly $322.50 gift to you - edw519
http://blog.stringbuffer.com/2009/05/google-app-engine-googles-monthly-32250.html

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soundsop
Kind of surprising that Google is lowering the quotas. This seems like bad
judgment that could anger a lot of account holders who will move from non-
paying to paying.

It would have been much better to start out with low quotas and gradually
raise them. What other freemium services have lowered the value of their free
service? I can't think of a single one.

Imagine Gmail doing something similar and reducing their storage quota. It's
unthinkable.

~~~
drawkbox
I agree. Taking it initially from 100GB to 10GB now in May to 1GB is extremely
limiting. In fact I was building a service on there but moving it based on
this.

The economics have changed drastically and really don't even compete with a
basic shared hosting account.

1GB per day and 6.5 CPU hours for free is nothing much really. There are
plenty of other cloud providers now that can compete on price.

One huge advantage to GAE was the free quota which was a huge draw. The
limiting architecture and broken platforms were ok to deal with at that. But
why not just build on EC2, Media Temple gs, Mosso, Joyent or some other now
where you can install almost anything you need as well as having the
scalability?

Very bad move by Google to reverse this drastically on the free quota which is
only now just a gimmick.

~~~
DocSavage
"But why not just build on EC2, Media Temple gs, Mosso, Joyent.."

It's already been pointed out many times before that EC2 != App Engine unless
you plan on building your own heroku, RightScale, or scalable system. The
price on those scalable services isn't base EC2 or VPS pricing either.

Included with the price of App Engine services is the outsourcing of server
instance management, datastore management, etc.

~~~
drawkbox
Agreed. I realize AppEngine != EC2. Amazon is more a set of components, EC2
being one that you are right you have to setup the systems to scale yourself.
In actuality, you will probably need EC2, SimpleDB, S3 etc.

I was trying to make the point that it makes Google AppEngine much less of an
advantage over other services in the market even ones you mention which
provide these managed components (many times without the restrictions of GAE,
I am a big fan of GAE and a little irked at the pricing). Media Temple gs has
some of what you mention.

But I believe a large reason people were even considering using Google is the
great startup potential to scale up and get lots for free at the beginning. No
startup can run with 1GB per day on a single digg, reddit, slashdotting at all
without paying. It gave about 3-6 months of runway before for growth now it
isn't really even a month of free for a reasonably known application or
content.

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lubos
It's not really a gift. They are plenty companies out there providing free
service with some limitations just like GAE. It's called marketing.

I wouldn't deploy anything on GAE as long as Google is the only provider.

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swombat
The domain name is plenty visible in the (brackets) on the right of the
title... why include it again in the title?

~~~
vaksel
he probably uses a shortcut to speed up submission process, and the domain
name is in the page title.

javascript:window.location=%22[http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURICompon...](http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent\(document.location\)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent\(document.title\))

~~~
andreyf
To remove formatting, indent 4 spaces:

    
    
        javascript:window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)

~~~
ars
And to annoy everyone, add a really long non-wrapping line to throw of the
formatting of the whole page.

Add some spaces in there, till it fits on one 1024 screen.

~~~
sho
To be fair, this is really a problem which should be fixed server-side.
Happens all the time and it's really annoying.

Long strings in a "code" box should either be broken up programatically
(spaces inserted slashdot-style?) or put in a div with a scrollbar.

~~~
drawkbox
overflow:hidden or overflow:scroll on the element or containing div would fix
it.

~~~
rms
It's there, it stopped working in Firefox 3.

~~~
pg
If anyone can tell me what to put in the html to fix the problem, I'd gladly
do it.

Why did this stop working in Firefox 3?

~~~
jcl
Xichekolas' Greasemonkey script fixes it for me in Firefox. Maybe you could
include the cross-browser equivalent of his Javascript snippet?
(<http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/25039>)

~~~
Xichekolas
Since the code in my GM script has become a bit ugly, here is the relevant
portion (cleaned up and commented):

    
    
      // Get all the pre tags within comments.
      var xpathpres = document.evaluate("//span[@class='comment']//pre", document, null, XPathResult.ORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
    
      // Iterate through them.
      for (var n = 0; n < xpathpres.snapshotLength; n++) {
        var thispre = xpathpres.snapshotItem(n);
    
        // Find width of the spacer image, add 120 (found experimentally).
        var reduction = (thispre.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.firstChild.firstChild.width || 0) + 120;
        //               pre     span       td         tr         td         img
    
        // Get the size of the browser window, default to 800px.
        var winsize = window.innerWidth || document.documentElement.clientWidth || document.body.clientWidth || 800;
    
        // Ensure a minimum width so things don't disappear.
        var width = Math.max(winsize - reduction, 300);
    
        // Set the width.
        thispre.style.maxWidth = width + 'px';
      }
    

Really seems like there should be a pure CSS solution to this though. As
others have pointed out, setting overflow-x: scroll and then defining widths
for all the containing elements explicitly would probably fix it without
depending on javascript.

If he were to use my solution, at least he would know the spacer image width
serverside, so wouldn't need javascript to find that. Would still have to use
it to find the window size though.

------
Saiyine
Do really exists any Java App Engine -based web out there? I'd love to have a
look.

