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Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I use AppEngine is because they offer free hosting. I guess we have to pay the price of using proprietary APIs for free stuff.

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It may be free for weekend projects but if you're planning to get some serious traffic, prepare for some hefty bills.

I've had App Engine projects that were on Product Hunt and Hacker News for a day, and the bill for those days were close to 0. (it did exceed the free tier, but not by much)

You probably wouldn't want to run Reddit on App Engine, but anything with medium traffic or decent monetization should work out just fine.

The only other caveat is that it may depend on what the app does and how you utilize the datastore. If you don't consider cost of the datastore when building an app, it could end up being expensive like you mentioned.

Our burn rate is about ~$200/day (not month), half of it for datastore ops.

If cost is your main concern, you can get VPS hosting from a dollar a month.

Is it as reliable as AppEngine?

If you're willing to spend $5/mo then DigitalOcean is a safe bet with excellent reliability. If you're a new customer then google for a Coupon before you sign up (saves you $20).

Don't try to go even cheaper, that way lies madness.

You cant compare AppEngine with DO or Heroku with AWS. Yes, AppEngine is costlier than DO 5-10X is comparing cost of computation power. You pay the price for not having to deal with DevOps, scalability and some cool API/services.

Amazon EC2 has a free teir.

Not if you've already been signed up with them for more than a year.

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