Appengine is NOT cheap hosting. It IS an massively-scalable, massively-redundant zero-admin development platform - and maybe I'm nuts but I expect to pay for that. I was glad Google set realistic prices and put appengine on a commercial footing, because I don't want it cancelled next time Google has a bad quarter.

Just to put this in perspective, we have four appengine apps that handle about half a million users between them. They generate a 6-figure annual revenue, and we pay Google around $50 a month. Yep, you read that right - $50. We've looked at AWS, but we'd pay a lot more - and that's without factoring in the cost of a good sysadmin to support it.

If you need a company website, appengine is probably not for you. If you're putting on a royal wedding and expect billions of hits for a short period, it's perfect. If you love tweaking your own firewall rules and tuning Postgresql for ultimate performance, you don't want appengine. If you're a development shop that wants a stable, scalable platform with the overhead of a sysadmin, welcome to your new home.