I could make a pretty good guess as to why it happened. Google's major income is from advertising, and while they're not going broke any time soon, the amount of money coming in from their advertising has dropped significantly, and so things they could have done as loss leaders to get more advertising dollars now are weighing more on the budget, so they needed to lower the payment bar on this service.
I'm sure they set the initial quotas with best intentions, but crunching some numbers, found that it was not going to be profitable. However, as with Gmail service, where the disk space available just keeps growing and growing, I'd be willing to bet that as AppEngine matures, we might see some new features and/or changes in quotas to make it even more appealing than it was in the pre-quota-change days. That having been said, there may be other reasons for the change. when they set the initial quotas, they did it based on a light- processing app getting, IIRC, 5 million hits per month. That number hasn't changed. It could very well be that when they set the quotas, they were thinking of the 5 million hits per month and it turns out that with proper accounting in place, what they were offering was enough for 50 or 500 million. I understand your frustration. I do. And they certainly could have handled this better so that it wouldn't feel like a bait-and-switch. But at the end of the day, the amount of free service they are offering is pretty substantial and for every case like yours I'd bet there are hundreds of people who are going to be able to start a business and get it profitable before they have to pay a dime. If this is for a non-profit organization, it still isn't the end of the world. I'm sure that the organization has grant writers who could get a $1,000/year grant to pay for the hosting without a problem, if it's going to help them do their good works. Good luck; I hope that the optimizations aren't too difficult, and that you can find some way to stay under those quotas. Keep the community posted! On Feb 24, 6:12 pm, "B.J." <bjp...@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't know that I have ever whined at an organization like Google > for trying to make money. > > That's changing with this message. > > By my calculations, it could cost me $1000 over the next year to host > my app that I had anticipated being hosted under the quotas. It may > cost me nothing.... right now our usage is just under the daily CPU > limits. If the traffic doesn't grow, no problem But whose goal is it > for an app not to get more usage? > > My only real gripe is that App Engine caused me to invest a lot of > effort in shoe-horning my app into the "Google Way". I did that with > the understanding that the trade-off was a certain amount of free > hosting. Was that a promise? Of course not. Is Google under any > obligation to meet my expectation? No. > > However, as I attempt to further optimize the application in an effort > to not exceed limits, the future of the application is now in > question. This is not a profit deal. I gave away my time in an > effort to help an organization. Had I known this change was coming, I > probably would have chosen a different solution. Because of the > "vendor lock-in" of App Engine, the end result of all this may be > simply turning the app off and letting the organization do without. > (or find someone else to help them out.) Better that than hit daily > free limits or find money out of someone's pocket. > > Look $1000/year is not a big deal for world-class hosting. I get it. > I also understand that the free quotas are only there to get people > "hooked" such as it were. I guess I wish had listened to those who > said, "Don't do App Engine. They'll lock you in and change the deal. > It's not portable enough." > > Shame on me, I guess. > > And before people chime in with all the, "You could always move it > to...", or "If you had just written it this way... " or "It's a > business, of course they're trying to get you to go over the limits.." > please.... don't. > > This is just a note to let the people at Google know there is a very > real cost to changing the deal on people. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
