Most of the discussion about Google App Engine seems to focus on how it allows you to scale your app, however I find it most useful for small client apps where we want a reliable platform while avoiding any ongoing hosting fee. For large apps paying for hosting would not be a problem.
These are some of the downsides I have found using Google App Engine:
Gae October 27, 2010
Google App Engine provides generous free quotas for your app and additional paid quotas.
I always enable billing for my GAE apps even though I rarely exhaust the free quotas. Enabling billing and setting paid quotas does not mean you have to pay anything and in fact increases what you get for free.
Here is a screenshot of the billing panel:
Gae April 15, 2010
In the previous post I covered three alternative approaches to regularly scrape a website for a client, with the most common one being in the form of a web application. However hosting the web application on either my own or the clients server has problems.
My solution is to host the application on a neutral third party platform - Google App Engine (GAE). Here is my overview of deploying on GAE:
Pros: