Ask HN: moving my Django app away from GAE, where do I go?
So I have this Django app (http://www.wysp.ws) that has gathered 1500 signups in 3 months of un-publicized beta, and is growing at an accelerating pace. It's hosted on Google App Engine (and user-submitted pictures are sent to S3).
I want to move away from GAE, because of several huge technical drawbacks:
- The 20 seconds limit for request processing make it impossible for my users to submit anything bigger than small pictures (upload time + processing time (resizing, etc) + time to send the file to S3 > 20 secs). Especially given that outbound traffic from GAE in seriously slow.
- I'm using the DB middleware Django-appengine to keep using Django's native models with the GAE Datastore, and I have come to realize how bad of an idea that is. Can't fetch (or count) more than 1000 objects, HUGE performance issues, etc.
- I can't believe how bad Google treats their paying customers. For instance: one day Google decided it didn't like my credit card info, which caused my application to go down for several hours... because each time I tried to reenter my CC info, after rejecting it Google would prevent me from trying again for 30 minutes (while the app was down). It happened several times in a row. No possibility to get support whatsoever. And that's just an example.
So where do I go? EC2? Rackspace? Gondor? Heroku? What would be the best and cheapest for a Django app with image uploading requirements?