Hi Sasha, It is indeed more expensive to run App Engine than the alternatives you mentioned for a few reasons: - We have a lot of infrastructure built out around the core machines that we don't charge for specifically but are included in the price of what you pay for (the request queue, the scheduler, all of the free APIs, etc) - It is a fully support service meaning there are people who keep it running 24 hours a day, even when something goes wrong in a datacenter (which will happen at some point) we ensure it is not up to you to fix it.
There have been a number of posts to the list about people running really small services that could fit on a single EC2 micro-instance, if what you are running can fit on that, and you never expect to scale past that, EC2 will likely be cheaper. But part of what you are getting with App Engine is the ability to scale when you need to without having to completely re-architect your app and without having to wake up if it happens in the middle of the night to figure out how much capacity you need. Frankly though, even on small apps, EC2 might not be cheaper if you have an app that gets very little traffic as App Engine apps under the free quota are free indefinitely whereas I don't believe any other service offers free capacity indefinitely. Hope that helps explain it, Greg On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:27 AM, Sasha Hart <s...@sashahart.net> wrote: > On Sep 2, 2:08 am, keakon lolicon <kea...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I wish I was the one who made a wrong decision. > > Ouch. > > It is sad that the billing changes seem to price a ton of > international customers out of the market. > > I wonder if recent events mean that the App Engine model (for lack of > a more precise term - here I mean the technology, not the business) is > just inherently much more costly than alternative models (like typical > VPS or EC2). Does the price reflect additional technological overhead? > Could others make changes to the model to run a similar service more > cheaply? > > -- > 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.
