Wednesday, 30th April, 2008
Its no longer a shared hosting
So, you want to develop a killer Internet application. You have a great idea, and ready to work on it. One thing that puzzles every web application developer is the choice of platform, host and the technology.If you haven't thought about scaling issues, you will be in a serious trouble and may require to rewrite the whole application. I past one year or so we have witnessed enormous developments in the web development tools and frameworks space. Frameworks like Django (this blog is written in django), Javascript libraries like YUI, Prototype, Scriptaculous, hosting platforms like Amazon EC2 and Google Appengine gives us great options in terms of what we can do and how we can transform our ideas. All the great technologies has given a new meaning to web 2.0.
I personally like Google Appengine because I like Python web programming and worked on couple of python frameworks. Google Appengine also gives seamless integration with Google accounts this is a big win win if your application requires user login and sign ups. On the other hand, Amazon EC2 gives you a server in the cloud, you have to take care of everything from imaging the machine, installing the webserver and configuring various components. This can be advantage for some individuals and companies, because it brings lot of flexibility and in real sense this is the true cloud computing, where you can just write any application which requires parallel processing and run on several machines at Amazon datacenter.
If your application is simply a database backed web application, Google Appengine can be a good choice, though its datastore technology will not give you full benefit of RDBMS database. Applications like Digg, Slashdot, delicious are good examples of high traffic sites which can be perfectly hosted with Google Appengine.
I am planning to move my blog from the shared hosting to Google Appengine. One benefit would be Google indexing, it would be so easy for Google crawler to index my site from one of its neighbour machine. :)
