As many people have said, it depends on your use case. In my case, I am an application developer, not a sysadmin - I like to spend my time making applications, not worrying about fine-tuning memcache, database replication, software upgrades, and load balancers. Appengine has been fantastic for me - my application took off from 0 to over a million users, and I haven't needed to think about capacity issues, security or availability. I like to say that if my app somehow got onto the Letterman Show, I would be popping champagne corks instead of blood vessels - I have the best sysadmins in the word looking after my service.
And all of this cost me less than $100 a month - and much less than that when volumes were smaller. So Appengine has let me scale from zero to serious volume without any pain, and sure, I could probably have saved a few bucks hosting somewhere else, but it would have cost me days in extra support time (and therefore dollars) and years of life expectancy because of the stress involved. So I LOVE Appengine, and believe it offers very good value. I'm not saying you have to love it too - in fact because you sound like you prefer to build and maintaining your own stack, you'l probably hate it because all the work is done for you - you're a sysadmin at heart. But for developers, Appengine is an excellent platform. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
