I would like to see Snapchat numbers. 

On Tuesday, 21 January 2014 20:33:38 UTC-2, Rafael Sanches wrote:
>
> Jim,
>
> It seems you're talking from a point of view of a big corporation. Since 
> snapchat didn't had big funding since short time ago, I was supposed we're 
> talking about startups. Big corporations are another beast where server 
> costs are irrelevant in it's sea of other useless costs and lazy people.
>
> I am talking from the point of view of a startup that struggles with cash 
> flow and find itself obligated to raise capital just to pay server costs. 
>
> I don't know why some people think I am insulting their family when I say 
> that appengine is very expensive for high traffic apps. Can you give me an 
> example where it's not expensive? I am giving my own because I've built 
> high traffic services for appengine, aws, hetzner, rackspace etc. 
>
> Is geographically dispersed services an essential feature for a startup? 
> It's simple till you complicate it. 
>
> thanks
> rafa
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Jim <jeb6...@gmail.com <javascript:>>wrote:
>
>> Yes, I'm quite aware of the various cloud stacks out there and have 
>> worked on projects using several of them including AWS and CloudStack. 
>>  Glad to see you're moving away from your $50 a month claim and it's now at 
>> 10 X $50 a month.  Now let's talk about geographically dispersed services 
>> with automated fail-over.  Then let's talk about what that good engineer 
>> you have costs you.  You really want to run your business on a platform 
>> with a single engineer behind it?  Does he/she get to sleep or go on 
>> vacation?  What happens when he/she quits?  You sure that cheap little 
>> hosting provider has the network bandwidth and resiliency you are going to 
>> need?  Now triple your infrastructure to be able to handle the hoped-for 
>> huge spike in volume.  Now crunch the numbers again and tell me what the 
>> savings really is.  It ain't anywhere close to $3,950 a month, that I am 
>> sure of.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 1:58:56 PM UTC-6, Rafael Sanches wrote:
>>
>>> Jim, 
>>>
>>> In 2014 a good engineer can create your own cloud infrastructure with 10 
>>> machines like the ones I suggested.
>>>
>>> Again, I am not saying that I don't like appengine. In fact, I love it 
>>> and that's why I stick with it. 
>>> I am saying it's over priced to run a service like Snapchat. I don't 
>>> think there's any argument there. 
>>>
>>>
>>> Kaan,
>>>
>>> This is my gift to you: https://gist.github.com/mufumbo/8547036
>>>
>>> It extends all of the appengine image features: "=s/-c" and includes the 
>>> most useful one: "=h"
>>>
>>> Depending on appengine's image serving is a limitation, since "vertical 
>>> cropping" is extremely useful on many elegant websites. 
>>>
>>> For example, play around with: http://c1.picmix.net/61757192=s682=h300or 
>>> http://c1.picmix.net/61757192=s300=h600
>>>
>>> By the way, another way to reduce server costs is to pay the $400 or 
>>> $200 a month in support. 
>>> That way you get access to discounted instance hours. It decreased our 
>>> bill a bit and give access to a place to get feedback when appengine is 
>>> having problems or when you need to tweak your scheduling and performance 
>>> parameters that you don't have access from XML config.
>>>
>>> About three months ago I spent a whole month optimizing my servers to 
>>> reduce the costs from $10k to $5k. Even now, I feel it's too overpriced for 
>>> the performance it's delivering.
>>>
>>> thanks
>>> rafa
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Kaan Soral <kaan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think he gets it much more than you give him credit for
>>>>
>>>> Hetzner example, as I interpret it, and think about it myself, is about 
>>>> the price of computing/ram/bandwith, although it's not comparable 1:1, 
>>>> it's 
>>>> important to know how cheap computing and hosting has become over the 
>>>> years, especially in this last 5-10 years
>>>>
>>>> It was really interesting to hear about your story Rafael, it was the 
>>>> approximate reason why I started this discussion, to learn and speculate 
>>>> about major services
>>>>
>>>> The 2000$ to 300$ cdn comparison is interesting, however no other 
>>>> service that I know of matches the extreme capabilities of google images 
>>>> service
>>>> I use the =s/-c resizing/cropping extensively, that's why I could never 
>>>> easily replace appengine, or the cdn
>>>>
>>>> You seem to have lived my worst case scenario, going out of money and 
>>>> having to ask others for money.
>>>>
>>>> Anyway if you don't mind it would be great to learn more about your 
>>>> product/story, but I'm guessing it's better to keep things as private as 
>>>> possible :)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 9:16:18 PM UTC+2, Jim wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1970's?  What on earth about my post made you think of the 1970's?   
>>>>> My description of geographically redundant, web based applications?  
>>>>> Please 
>>>>> indeed.
>>>>>
>>>>> The link you provided is for a LAMP hosting service... basically what 
>>>>> I described in my third scenario about.  That's apples-vs-oranges as 
>>>>> compared to GAE.  
>>>>>
>>>>> I suggest you consult with the Application Architects where you work 
>>>>> and politely ask them to describe the differences to you.  Clearly nobody 
>>>>> here is getting through to you and I don't have the time or the 
>>>>> inclination.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 12:35:13 AM UTC-6, Rafael Sanches wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Guys, 
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Please, we're not in 1970 anymore. There is no argue that appengine 
>>>>>> is the most expensive hosting on earth and possibly the universe.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> My company spend $4000 a month with appengine. We could host the same 
>>>>>> service with $50 in a more powerful environment:
>>>>>> http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-
>>>>>> produktmatrix-ex<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hetzner.de%2Fen%2Fhosting%2Fproduktmatrix%2Frootserver-produktmatrix-ex&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHB4pohCO2ZKGcxoTG5sY0nc6pvDw>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> With $300 we could make it redundant and more reliable and faster 
>>>>>> than appengine. 
>>>>>> A dedicated server is also more reliable, because of appengine 
>>>>>> infamous "hicupps" due to its scheduling system and instance boot time. 
>>>>>> In one of my services I rent a rack with 20 spaces and it's filled 
>>>>>> with only 10 severs. It means I can scale my servers with 10 more. That 
>>>>>> configuration costs $1000. 
>>>>>> Please, pay attention for 10 dedicated quad-core with 32GB of ram. 
>>>>>> How much would you pay in appengine for that type of throughput? I did 
>>>>>> the 
>>>>>> calculations: $60k. 
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Please, it's incomparable price wise. There's no argue and let's not 
>>>>>> go there :)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> thanks
>>>>>> rafa
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 1:44 PM, Jim <jeb6...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I've seen many variations of this statement, "Google App Engine is 
>>>>>>> expensive!", and it always strikes me as a bit off.  I supppose it 
>>>>>>> depends 
>>>>>>> on your perspective and your requirements.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> For the past three years I've been running a small start-up building 
>>>>>>> a SaaS analytics application.  For the prior 25 years or so I built 
>>>>>>> enterprise apps for some well-known software houses.  The last 12 years 
>>>>>>> I 
>>>>>>> was building SaaS-based software products serving top-tier global 
>>>>>>> financial 
>>>>>>> institutions.  During that time I worked on projects where we built, 
>>>>>>> from 
>>>>>>> the ground up, 2 different web-based solutions which wound up serving 
>>>>>>> tens-of-thousands of end-users and very large volumes of 
>>>>>>> system-to-system 
>>>>>>> (B2B type) transaction volumes.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> When we created our infrastructure for these systems we needed 
>>>>>>> multiple geographically dispersed data centers, high levels of 
>>>>>>> fault-tolerance within any given data center, n-tier architecture, 
>>>>>>> secure 
>>>>>>> systems, scalable databases and front-end servers, system, security and 
>>>>>>> network monitoring and administration, etc.  When you spec that all out 
>>>>>>> from scratch, you will have a hard time doing it for less than several 
>>>>>>> hundred thousand dollars capex with big ongoing opex expense.  Any 
>>>>>>> growth 
>>>>>>> beyond your initial headroom will require additional capex expenditure 
>>>>>>> and 
>>>>>>> incremental ongoing opex.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Depending on the profile of your application and the system load, at 
>>>>>>> some point you will pass the threshold of it being cheaper to build and 
>>>>>>> maintain your own equivalent infrastructure, but that threshold is 
>>>>>>> very, 
>>>>>>> very high.  So it makes me think people who say GAE is 'expensive' are 
>>>>>>> not 
>>>>>>> making a comparison such as this.  Maybe they don't really need 
>>>>>>> everything 
>>>>>>> that GAE offers.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Or perhaps they are comparing GAE to other cloud offerings such as 
>>>>>>> AWS?  Amazon's pricing doesn't seem to be radically different than 
>>>>>>> Google's 
>>>>>>> to me, for similar services.  And given that Amazon's PaaS solution is 
>>>>>>> not 
>>>>>>> yet as complete at GAE, I think that any complete appliation built on 
>>>>>>> AWS 
>>>>>>> is going to require some level of system-engineering.  System engineers 
>>>>>>> are 
>>>>>>> not cheap. One of the things we like about GAE is that, at this point 
>>>>>>> in 
>>>>>>> our corporate evolution, we can focus entirely on our Customers and our 
>>>>>>> Software and not spend money or time configuring hardware, OS and other 
>>>>>>> "low level" stuff that we (as application software guys) don't want to 
>>>>>>> mess 
>>>>>>> with.  There are very real hard and soft monetary benefits to this. 
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Or maybe when people say "expensive" they mean as compared to other 
>>>>>>> "cloud" offerings that are more along the lines of rented physical or 
>>>>>>> virtual machines.  Yes, some of these can be cheap compared to GAE.  
>>>>>>> But 
>>>>>>> these are really apples-to-oranges comparisons when you consider all 
>>>>>>> the 
>>>>>>> things you need to provision a global, "utility-grade" (aspirationally, 
>>>>>>> anyway) SaaS offering.  
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> So I guess this post is a long-winded way of me saying "GAE 
>>>>>>> Expensive?  Really?  What exactly do you mean by that?  Compared to 
>>>>>>> what?"
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Monday, January 20, 2014 4:19:54 AM UTC-6, coto wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> We all should be surprised, because Google App Engine is very 
>>>>>>>> expensive!!
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On Sunday, January 19, 2014 5:23:13 AM UTC-3, alex wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Why were you surprised?
>>>>>>>>
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>>>
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