

You can go beyond quotas now on Google AppEngine - timf
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-grow-your-app-beyond-free-quotas.html

======
fortes
Note that they'll also be reducing the free bandwidth and CPU-time quotas.
Bandwidth goes to 1GB in/out per day and CPU to 6.5 hours / day

~~~
DenisM
To be fair, at 300Gb/month of free stuff they would have killed most web
hosting companies out there. That's a lot of data.

~~~
patio11
_To be fair, at 300Gb/month of free stuff they would have killed most web
hosting companies out there._

Most web hosting companies to not depend on extraordinarily price-conscious
highly technical people for their bread and butter.

Could you have gotten Wordpress working on Google without having an
engineering degree? Could you have set up a simple brochureware site without
an engineering degree? These are common customer requirements among the cheap,
mass market web hosting companies.

------
blasdel
What's interesting to me is that there are still hard limits for billing-
enabled apps.

There's the respectable ones: You get the full use of a 100 megabit pipe, 72
CPUs, and a 500 req/s proxy; plus you can send millions of emails a day.

On the other hand, the limits on datastore and memcache access are out of
proportion to the bandwidth and request limits, especially when compared to
the free limits. With a paid app you're unlikely to be able to ever hit the
Bandwidth / CPU / Request limits because you'll be starved for data, whereas
with a free app the opposite is true.

~~~
DenisM
They prolly watched whatever real apps they had and determined appropriate
balance based on that data.

But then some things look very odd. Like: "data sent to datastore API" capped
at 153Mb/min, which is 2.5Mb/sec. Uhm. I don't think this qualifies as a
distributed high-scale system, if that's the best they can do...

------
artaak
How does it compare with Amazon's offer? I had the feeling that Amazon offers
more for less, not even talking independence-wise.

~~~
DocSavage
I don't think it's a straightforward comparison. App Engine to me is similar
to Heroku or EC2 + RightScale. It'll be interesting to see Heroku pricing
since they've got to charge more than raw AWS pricing. The cost of raw
resources from AWS and Google are similar -- depends on what you are using on
the AWS-side for data storage.

------
bprater
I think it's very very cool of Google to allow apps in their system for free
as long as they stay below a specific threshold.

There is no excuse now not to rapidly prototype apps and throw them out there.

------
pierrefar
What about the cost of Google lockin? Can you imagine App Engine going offline
like GMail did this morning?

Make me feel uneasy.

~~~
mcxx
This can happen anywhere, with any hosting solution as long as you don't have
physical access to you servers. AWS, Linode, Slicehost...they all can go down.

~~~
patio11
You can have physical access to your servers and still watch them go down.
Your upstream bandwidth provider had a technician trip on a power switch. Your
city suffers a Katrina-level disturbance in normal operating conditions. etc,
etc Its all a matter of what risks you tolerate.

Anecdote: Google Search has had more downtime in the last 400 days than my
main Slicehost slice. This demonstrates to me two things: a) Slicehost is
awesome and b) you are the weakest link, whether "you" are Google's whole
engineering team or one guy coding from next to a rice paddy.

------
dustineichler
Question: is anyone using this as hosting instead of building a webapp. Is
that against the terms? I've thought about just putting up a relatively simple
slightly static django page and using google app engine as hosting.

~~~
ovi256
There are some CMS AppEngine apps out there [1] so if you want to host a
simple brochureware site, it's definitely feasible. It's still not "one click"
simple though, namely you need to know how to checkout and deploy the app. I'm
wondering why nobody writes something to give simple one click access to such
a CMS. Hmm that gives me an idea... One click access to any AppEngine app
given its source repository. That would be nice.

[1]
[http://appgallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=agphcHBnYWxsZ...](http://appgallery.appspot.com/about_app?app_id=agphcHBnYWxsZXJ5chMLEgxBcHBsaWNhdGlvbnMY_gwM)

------
DocSavage
There seems to be an inconsistency in the cited storage pricing. The blog post
says $0.15/GB/mo, but the docs and my app dashboard (which are most likely to
be correct) say $0.005/GB/mo, which is a huge drop if true.

~~~
DocSavage
It's still $0.15/GB/mo. The unit wasn't given but it was $0.005/GB/day.

------
numair
This is really, really significant. The fact that you can go above quota, and
pay for the privilege, makes me far more likely to consider using this
product. I might even get around to learning Python...

~~~
DenisM
There are other good reasons to learn python, namely the thrilling, liberating
ability to make useful programs quickly and without having to write and
maintain a lot of pointless glue code (looking at you here, Java, C++ and co).

GAE was that which tipped me over to learn python and I am very glad now.

------
microG
The honeymoon is nearly over. Google is a business that needs to be
compensated for its core strengths.

