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How does the cost of hosting on Google App Engine compare to hosting on more classical servers for a high traffic website?

What's the answer for a website with 1000 page views per minute and how do the costs compare at 10000 page views per minute?

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Can you be a little more specific as to 'high traffic' ? – Tim Post♦ Jul 16 '10 at 11:22
My website isn't build yet, so I unfortunately don't have specific knowledge about how much traffic it will get. – Christian Jul 16 '10 at 11:28
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You really need to define 'high traffic'. Do you expect a hundred page views per minute? One thousand? Ten thousand? – Robert Munteanu Jul 16 '10 at 12:09

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So it sounds like you're concerned that Google App Engine will work and scale for you, but you're going to get to a point where you exceed their capacity to host you without being costly. Is that right?

I think the thing to do here is to have an "exit strategy" for your App. I think you need this regardless of whether you exceed Google's limits or not. What if Google decides App Engine is a money loser? What if it stops supporting the APIs you want to use?

Check out AppScale, which is intended to be an open source version of Google App Engine for what might end up as your fallback should you outgrow GAE's limits.

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Yes, that seems a good description of my concern. I will look at AppScale. – Christian Jul 17 '10 at 11:46
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I was going to post this as a comment but just since you wrote "My website isn't built yet", please take a look at the limits for a free account:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html#Resources

                     Per day            Per minute
Requests             1.3m requests      7,400 requests/minute
Outgoing Bandwidth   1 gb               56 mb/minute
Incoming Bandwidth   1 gb               56 mb/minute
CPU Time             6.5 CPU-hours      16 CPU-seconds/minute

If you think you will use a lot more than that, it's one serious web site.

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I think it will be a serious website, that's why I said high traffic. – Christian Jul 16 '10 at 11:45
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I think those limits are about the same as the traffic of stackoverflow.com. – delete Jul 16 '10 at 12:19
The bandwidth is kind of skinny, depending on what the site will be serving. That's only 30 GB / average per month down. If its just text and a few images, sure, its plenty. – Tim Post♦ Jul 16 '10 at 14:45
@Christian - is the site more likely to be bandwidth intensive, or request intensive, or cpu intensive .. or perhaps a combination of several? You need to give us a little to work with here :) – Tim Post♦ Jul 16 '10 at 14:57
@Tim: I think it's probably CPU intensive and it will be hard to cache a lot of the data as it's provided by specific users. – Christian Jul 17 '10 at 11:46
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