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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the author has costed out how much running this app would cost using a VPS provider like Linode or Digital Ocean? You can get a lot of resources for under $100 a month and the needs of most apps are pretty basic (file storage+db+web server). Given the memory requirements and speed of Go, it shouldn't take much hardware to serve a lot of requests with a few go instances behind nginx say.

I'm not convinced that being locked in to one cloud provider's services and APIs is healthy long term - it means you are locked in to that ecosystem and it's harder to consider alternatives, even if your needs are quite straightforward, so you can end up in a situation where you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for hosting when you don't need to be.

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What about the datastore? I can get thousands of requests per second (which I did when I released and it hit HN), and the site was as fast as if I had 1 hit per second. Traditional databases don't scale like that. If you want it to scale like that, it gets difficult and expensive. The datastore does all of this + multi datacenter replication + predictive performance regardless of load.

Matt, you might want to look at DynamoDB, which would at least let you do a cost comparison to an AWS stack.

This tweet from former AppEngine dev Brett Slatkin caught my eye: https://twitter.com/haxor/status/411351463806263296

I still think Dynamo has a ways to catch up in terms ease of use to GAE, but it provides the performance, scalability, and replication like datastore.

If you're caching feeds, would you require thousands of requests to the db per second, or just thousands of web requests?

It'd be an interesting test to try setting up a simple stack of psql/nginx/memcache and your go processes behind, and serving up the same data from it, to see what sort of performance you get, but I understand why you wouldn't bother if your app is somewhat tied in to the datastore already and works fine for you as is. Just out of interest, did you start on something else and move over to Google App Engine for performance, or start there?

Started on app engine. I've been using and happy with it for 4 years.

Yes, I could set up a simple psql stack. But I would lose automatic multi data center replication and infinite scaling, so that's not a win. My database hit 500GB in a few months. I don't want to deal with scaling up psql instances when it doubles in size over the next year again. See my first post linked below about when newsblur hit the HN frontpage and was effectively down for 3 days due to load. It's because psql doesn't scale in that direction.

http://mattjibson.com/blog/2013/06/26/go-read-open-source-go...

Thanks for elucidating - I work on sites with a different balance of users vs traffic and data (maybe more users but less data and not so spiky), so it's interesting to hear about your experience on that and why you'd go for app engine, which compared to self hosting can seem like an expensive option.

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