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Comment by redstripe | Hacker News Reader

So despite the vociferous defense app engine received here about a month ago after some criticism it looks like no YC companies actually use it?

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It looks like this is considering only the root domain, and for App Engine hosted sites this would probably be an external server not hosted by Google that just redirects you to the www subdomain (where you'd have your CNAME to ghs.google.com), so they wouldn't show up as such.

Wattvision is hosted on App Engine.

This. As jf says below, "host is determined by the name of the owner of the netblock that the IP address of the A record for that domain is in..."

You can't point an A record at App Engine.

It could be that the app isn't hosted at the same place as the public site (which this chart reports on). That's how it is for Zencoder.

Jobspice is hosted by App Engine. The host field says "Google".

We chose GAE for JobSpice for a number of reasons, but yes, JobSpice is a GAE app.

I think a large part of this has to do with programming language choice. I suspect there is a large group of ruby hackers out there who can only use Amazon, and not GAE.

A survey of language choice by YC companies would be interesting - I think Python is actually very well represented.

I'd guess that the reason people aren't using AppEngine is more that it's strategically a pretty bad idea. You can't move off it, and its constraints have a major effect on how you design and architect your application. When you're still figuring out what your product is, using a platform that requires you to design your data storage to fit the queries you are going to run isn't necessarily that smart.

I second that. Wouldn't be hard to add the languages.

Wasn't data access very slow up until recently? From the outside I question how important GAE is to Google, has it got a decent sized team behind it and will it always be around. With Amazon cloud hosting seems much more of a key business. Of course this is from the outside if I were considering options, I don't use either of them.

unless exit.goal == google.buy(self)

Heroku seems like a better analog to AppEngine for Rubyists than Amazon's services.

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