I'm running 3 apps on GAE with a total of ~150 instances. I had my app in PHP/Mysql on dedicated servers at first, and as I needed to scale, I moved to Python/GAE. I cannot do a fair comparison between the cost on dedicated servers and the cost on GAE because I also added new features. With that in mind, at the time of migration my GAE cost was about 4X what I paid on dedicated servers. But it's felt it was worth it because I get scaling, fault tolerance, and server admin for free. Overall, I felt that GAE was not cheap, but a good deal and I recommended it to everyone and got several other startups to use it based on my recommendation.
I do tend to agree with the post on many points, though. The datastore gets slow and fails often (I'm on Master/Slave). The taskqueue also gets slow periodically creating long backlogs. And even when it's not slow, it generally runs tasks several seconds after their scheduled time. The price is more expensive than regular hosting if your app grows. And if you encounter a bug, it takes weeks of complaining on the mailing list before someone from Google lends a helping hand. That's on the dark side, but it's not all dark though. On the bright side, GAE is a lot of fun to work with. It hides all the boring details of managing servers and let's you focus on your product. And although it fails more often than dedicated servers, it's usually for shorter periods and it gets back online without requiring you to do anything. And, obviously, you don't need to worry about scaling too much. Overall, even with the mentioned issues, I still like GAE more than other options. But the new pricing makes it more expensive than I can afford. I'm looking for ways to optimize my code to reduce cost, and also looking at other options such as TyphoonAE and AppScale. Even if I end up moving some of my apps somewhere else, I'll probably continue to use GAE for smaller projects simply because of the easy setup and no hassle hosting. Waleed On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Brandon Wirtz <drak...@digerat.com> wrote: > Support for a system with 100 users and 100k users is about the same. No > one bills for support separately (Fine GAE bills $500) so the small guys > pay > more to cover support and administration. > > > -----Original Message----- > From: google-appengine@googlegroups.com > [mailto:google-appengine@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of zdravko > Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 3:32 PM > To: Google App Engine > Subject: [google-appengine] Re: The price of Scalability > > This price of scalability is an interesting animal. Looking at AWS (for an > example) transfer out bandwidth charges alone, the lowest and most > expensive > usage bracket is full 6x (SIX TIMES) more expensive then the highest and > least expensive bracket. Considering that it's just bandwidth and that it > considers the least amount of "effort" to dissect and repackage into > smaller > doses, it is quite clear how much us little guys are subsidization the big > boys. > > Was the whole idea of volume buying not based on a premise of "economies > of > scale" ? Using delivery of physical goods as an example, was it all not > supposed to be based on the premise that delivering a truck load of > something is lot more economical then delivering a single pallet or a > single > book of matches? If so, then what is it about bandwidth that makes it SIX > TIMES more expensive to deliver to us smaller guys? > > Are these sorts of pricing discounts in fact not the world's biggest price > collusions and price fixing? How can the little guy ever manage to compete > when it has to forever keep on subsidizing the big boys? > Where would the big conglomates ever be and what would really their bottom > lines look like if they had to pay their fare share? > > When it comes to bandwidth, I can not image a price differential that is > more than TWICE - between the smallest and the biggest bandwidth users? > > ARE WE THE ONES WHO ARE MAKING FINANCIALLY VIABLE USAGE MONSTERS SUCH AS > WWW.YOUTUBE.COM ?!? > > > > On Jul 3, 8:27 am, Tony <lpth...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I just read this > > posthttp://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~silver/gae.html > > > > The author seems unhappy with App Engine's offerings and have switched > > to EC2, saying when the app scales big, the cost is very high (he used > > the old Master/Slave datastore with high latency counted against CPU > time). > > > > I myself like app engine a lot because from what I heard it offers > > good scalability without complex setup and maintenance. But I don't > > have much experience with it to say if the claims in the above post are > true. > > Especially now there are changes in pricing, I'm afraid the costs may > > be driven a lot higher. > > > > Can anyone who is having a popular app on app engine give me your > > thoughts on the post? Do you see the new pricing scheme make scaling > > app a lot more expensive? > > -- > 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. > > > -- > 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. > > -- 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.
