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Best(cost and scalability) hosting solution for a web application

1 points by erebrus ↗ HN
We're preparing a web application that realistically has the potential to quickly escalate to a large number of users. On the other hand, we would not be the first to be wrong in that assumption :p

We are doing this "pro-bono", so we would prefer to cut on initial costs - later maybe advertising can cover hosting - but at the same time we don't won't to compromise too much our ability to deal with the hoped/expected fast growth of our user community and therefore traffic.

The options we see are:

a) to start with in-house hosting and if we start getting a lot of traffic, then migrate to external hosting as quick as possible. However, I wonder how fast and easy such migration would be, since we wouldn't want to have the site down for 2 months while we migrate to a separate infrastructure.

b) immediately invest on external hosting, which would provide us the scalability, but require a significant investment from the start...

c) ?

I'm sure we're not the first facing this dilemma. Any suggestions? For those suggesting b), any recommendation on providers?

Thanks.

PS: The application will be GWT+Google Maps+Tomcat+MySQL.

4 comments

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nudge
If you don't mind developing for their data structure, I think Google App Engine makes scaling pretty easy.
erebrus
I actually looked at that. But for what I read, the cost is then based on user base, 8$ per user per month at a max of 1000$ per month. So we would probably reach that on the first month...
nudge
I think that is just their App Engine for Business costs: (for others' reference: http://code.google.com/appengine/business/)

You may want the extra services that this gives, but it is not the standard App Engine offering.

If you are not using App Engine for Business, the costs are for CPU and bandwidth, etc., and not for users, and so should be significantly less than that.

edit: The standard pricing structure is at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html and there is a free quota as well which is pretty generous.

erebrus
Ah...cool, thanks :) I'll definitely look into it again then. Like you pointed thought, it's also a case of analyzing if the datastore is worth the extra effort...