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Comment by kuiper83 | Hacker News Reader

Link was down for me here is the google cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B3qA4jq...

What's the alternative? I actually thought databases were the cutting edge. Or maybe I've been out of the loop.

I think you meant to reply to bigdubs

Databases are fine, but blogs change infrequently and mostly serve the same static content. Caching the database-generated pages, or just serving static files, if much more efficient, especially when a crowd comes.

Can better blogs be built on top of Google's App Engine? I've been building on top of it with Go but I don't use app engine's data store, and I'm not sure that I want to. My little database is a pregenerated Go variable.

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html

I'd like to add more features but I don't want to reinvent everything. Anyway, Go and App Engine handle the load well and so far it has been free.

Django runs on app engine, so a blog no problem. WordPress is a one click install I believe ( on a VM). Oh and app engine https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/appengine-wordpress-p...

You can run a blog on a cloud platform, set up auto-scaling, and withstand a reddit / hn / slashdot crowd.

You will likely run out of the free tier and into significant spending during the spike pretty soon.

If you ran a highly interactive page that required a lot of non-trivial server-side processing, I'd understand.

But blogs serve the same static content to almost every request. I don't see why burning a whole lot of CPU and IO on it by running python/php/ruby and hitting a database many times is worth it. Serving a set of static files automatically generated by a blog engine (like Jekyll) seems much more reasonable to me.

Regarding comments: Disqus or something like that could help. Or you could turn the comments off during a spike: seeing the content without comments is a much better user experience than seeing a 500 Server Error page.

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