Comment by rcmorin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcmorin | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for your reply, Jacques. This was helpful.

We released on GAE and we're also using Amazon SQS. At our peak load, we were getting over 1.5-2k users streaming in during the initial price drop. CPU Time was our biggest drain: we've combined instant messaging with a local and global search option which eats up resources fairly quickly. I was very surprised at GAE server costs given a userbase that is <10k at this point (given the costs I had to put the breaks on growth very quickly).

The VC approach was for seed-stage capital (~100k) - I found a few "programs"/funds targeting early stage companies. Basically, I'm looking for a business angel that could assume a mentorship role and provide some "smart capital" at this point to scale.

How hard would it be to port away from GAE and get your costs under control ? The 'cloud' is a great place to be when you want to scale but it can also be quite expensive.

So far for the projects that I'm involved in I have yet to find a single case where I can make a case for a cloud solution vs hosting the stuff directly. (but there are other reasons than financial ones to use a cloud).

Where are you located ?

Wow, that's rough. I noticed on my brief foray into AppEngine that it is really easy to run up against their CPU limitations (as in, four trivial queries on a single pageload will do it), but it's amazing that you've managed to run up a $1,000/mo bill with them.

Or are you really burning through SQS requests fast enough to make it cost cash money?

Either way, it sounds like you've painted yourself into a corner it will be hard to get out of. AppEngine is probably the most difficult platform imaginable in terms of how hard it is to migrate off of. You'll have a ton of work to do just to get out of BigTable, and then you're left with a Django app.

I guess the best you can do is start charging money, and start developing a new version as quickly as possible to stop the bleeding.

Good luck!

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