+1 for Pivotal Tracker. One of the most polished UIs I've worked with. It's a pleasure for development teams to use; I use it for both freelancing and the day job. Also helps management have its finger on the pulse of progress, and have an accurate answer to the question "when will X be done?"
Wait, no Heroku? It should definitely be listed in the Price-Scalable Hosting section. Like AppEngine it's also free starting out, and super easy to scale. Plus it's all rails, so you don't even have to learn any App Engine API.
I think it's a lot more expensive than App Engine though. You quickly get into hundreds of dollars a month range for just a few extra features and two running processes.
I'm not sure I trust Google App Engine; it's a roundoff error for Google. Why should they care if something goes wrong? Heroku cares about Ruby webapp deployment the way Google cares about search.
Most people won't require every addon, and there's a free or cheap option in every case. Yes, you can spend "hundreds of dollars a month" but not easily
2 x processes + 20GB database + unlimited bundles + SSL ($20-100/month depending on your needs) == $91-$171/month. And that's for just two thin processes with a few extra features that are generally required for most apps.
It jumps to more than $200 if you want just one more Thin process or a background worker, etc.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with Heroku's pricing, but I wouldn't considering it a "cheap or free web-based tool".
+1 I used domai.nr as well, but less frequently than the other two mentioned. Domai.nr is great for finding shorter names and creative variations of longer ones.
Litmusapp may be nicer and have summaries, but it's hard to beat browsershot's simplicity, breadth, and free-ness. Though I have yet to see any provide decent testing for anything dynamic (videos, perhaps?).
browsershots.org is good, but some generator nodes can be extremely slow (30 minute wait times). For IE-only screenshots, I like to use http://meineipadresse.de/netrenderer/index.php , which provides IE screenshots in about 7 seconds.
Perhaps, but the question I was responding to was about "pain points". All I was saying is if you're coming from an RDBMS background, as I am, then there are growing pains in adjusting to using BigTable. If you don't have the time or patience to make the adjustment, then this will be a pain point. Otherwise, perhaps it's a selling point.
The 30 second per page limit can be a pain too. If you need to manipulate (i.e. validate, import, export, etc.) more than a few hundred persistent objects, you'll need to write your code to do it in chunks.
With the Task Queue API, applications can perform work outside of a user request but initiated by a user request. If an app needs to execute some background work, it may use the Task Queue API to organize that work into small, discrete units, called Tasks. The app then inserts these Tasks into one or more Queues. App Engine automatically detects new Tasks and executes them when system resources permit.
Cold startup is almost unnoticeable for Python apps (bite my lip! see update below). On the Java side it can be an issue but, as with most things, if you dig around, you can find some acceptable workarounds.
Wow, you're right. I just ran a test on one of my Python apps and found the same thing. I always assumed 4 seconds was an acceptable start up time, especially when compared with some of the Java apps I have runnning on App Engine which have often exceeded the 30 second page limit on startup and generated a DeadlineExceededException. Thanks for showing your results. I would never have known this was an issue.
You could - but it would need to be every 1 minute. Google tears down your app after 60-90 seconds of inactivity.
Some folks have resorted to pinging every minute but Google discourages that since it ties up their resources. If everyone pinged their site once a minute then resources would never be freed....
There's no lock-in on the Java side. Change a few lines in
jdconfig.xml, add the datanucleus-rdbms jar file, add a JDBC driver jar file and you're app will run on Tomcat or Jetty with MySQL or any database with a JDBC driver.
Didn't see this category, but for the developers of a startup, an easy to use / free bug tracking system can be found in BugNotes: http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php
Mailchimp is awesome. Don't know how it compares to Campaign Monitor. If you're a belt & suspenders type, use a Wufoo form and send that to MailChimp, then you can easily switch later.
The email collection tools in Campaign Monitor are totally free. You just pay when you send mail.
When I was organizing Startup Bootcamp, I emailed both CM and MailChimp to ask for a donation. MailChip offered us a discount, but CM gave us an extremely generous number of credits that easily covered our needs.
Using CM is a breeze. Originally we were using a Google Doc as a signup, and felt the need to switch once we hit a few hundred people. Importing the data was effortless, and CM has built-in checks for both duplicate and malformed emails. Their analytics and reporting is also great. Highly recommended.
