[unoti]

He mentioned that he was doing 12 requests per second, and it was costing him $10/day on App Engine. I rent a server from Rackspace, and do volume in the 12 requests per second range, and including bandwidth this costs me under $40/mo. Am I doing the math wrong, or is App engine kinda expensive compared to rolling your own solutions with virtual private servers?

[timothyb89]

It definitely can be, if you write your app assuming that you are working with a traditional server. You're very directly charged for writing inefficient apps. I have a moderately popular app running on the AppEngine right now that initially had similar cost problems, but spending a few days with the cost profiler can resolve most issues. You have to be particularly smart about caching and datastore queries. What I found in the end was that after proper optimization, I was able to get a better value out of the app engine than with a normal VPS - but it definitely takes some extra work to get there.

[rharter]

timothyb89 is quite right. The cost wasn't just for a standard server, much of that came from the number of datastore reads I was performing, since the original backend wasn't using memcache the best, etc. It also wasn't syncing in the most efficient way, so that added a lot of overhead. There is still room for improvement, but just with a weekend of optimization, I've been able to reduce the cost by an order of magnitude. That, mixed with the automatic scaling makes it quite competitive.

[ianstallings]

How can you compare two different requests without knowing the payload?