

Ask HN: Google App engine pricing vs. AWS? - petervandijck

Roughly, how does App engine pricing compare to AWS. Of course, App engine is free at first (although it's hard for me to get a sense for how much you get for free).<p>In particular: I have a forum app running on AWS, costs me about 150$/month, getting about 500,000 pageviews. Could I run this for free on Google Appengine?
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malandrew
Besides pricing, be sure to keep in mind some of the technical limitations
with Google AppEngine. Here are two serious ones:

1) Last I checked there was still no naked domain support. So if you plan on
defaulting to <http://mystartup.com/> instead of <http://www.mystartup.com/>,
you might want to check if this is possible yet.

2) HTTPS support is limited to <https://mystartup.appspot.com/>. You CANNOT
use <https://www.mystartup.com/> last time I check. This is due to a technical
limitation in SSL certificates that I'm not sure was considered at the time
that Google designed the AppEngine architecture. There are ways around this,
but it's messy and inelegant.

One of the great benefits of AppEngine is using it as a cache server, because
if I remember correctly this is either free or really cheap. I forget the
exact details of how we worked this out at my last startup, but it's worth
looking into because using Google's global datacenters for caching is much
much cheaper than paying for AWS bandwidth and you also get much lower latency
times.

~~~
dotBen
I heard flat files and binaries were intentionally bottlenecked to deter
people using app engine as a binary cache/edge cache.

Do you have data/etc on the performance?

~~~
malandrew
dotBen,

I will contact the devs I used to work with and ask them about that and let
you know.

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HowardRoark
<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html>

Assuming that is your daily pageviews, you could run that app for free on
Google Appengine.

The only down side to Appengine in my experience is the cost of rewriting the
app and migration, and performance issues (and cold start up times) related to
Appengine's architecture.

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pwim
You will need to rewrite your forum for AppEngine (or find some forum software
written specifically for AppEngine).

AWS's main selling point is that you can programmaticly add and remove
instances. If you are not using that, I'd consider migrating to a VPS such as
slicehost or linode, where you should be able to run your forum as is.

