Are Google App Engine Quotas enough?

Question

I was thinking about giving a try with google app engine.

As such I was just reviewing the quotas/limitation the service has.

Although google states:

All applications can use up to 1 GB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month, absolutely free.

The request quotas seem rather low, with only 1GB Outgoing bandwidth in the Requests limits is that enough?...or am I not interpreting correctly?

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html#Requests

Mormon

Answer 1

It sounds like your question should be... "Are Google App Engine's FREE Quotas 'enough.' The limits you are describing only apply to App Engine's Free Default limit.

For example... for requests, the billable limit is 14,400 GB per day maximum, with a maximum request rate of 10 GB/minute. There is no Incoming Bandwidth limit when billing is enabled.

I think the question you should ask yourself is "what type of application do I want to build." If you have application requirements that you think will exceed the default free tier, then you should plan your budget accordingly.

Chaffin

Does incoming requests stands for data that is sent to the server? like a client uploading information? Thanks for the response – Mormon

Yes, but each incoming request must be under 32Mb. See: code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html#Requests – Chaffin

Answer 2

It depends on the things you want to do with Googles App Engine. You have 1 GB Outgoing Bandwidth each day. So you have 30 GB each month (Amazon gives you for their AWS even 15 GB free outgoing traffic each month).

For private normal usages I never reached the limits. But it is hard to say what is "normal".

Clippers

Is the 1GB outgoing is unique per GAE project or total of the account? – Franciscka

It's per project / application. Check out cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas for more details. – Clippers

Answer 3

This is a very late answer but I think you (did) misunderstand.

With App Engine you get 1 GB of free bandwidth per day. Meaning 30 GB free per month

With 30 GB of free bandwidth Google stats that you can serve "around 5 million page views a month".

Let's do the math:
30 GB = 31457280 KB 31457280 / 5000000 = 6.29 KB To provide 5 million page view on 30 GB monthly your page will need to be as little as 6.29 KB.
Maybe Google was speaking about a small REST API compressed over gzip. Or, maybe they tried to impress use with a big "5 million".

Average web page is around 1246 KB.
31457280 / 1246 = 25246 So on a average web server you will be able to provide 25246 page monthly (in the best case)

Flagellum

You are not taking client-side caching into account. 6.29kb of non-cacheable content is still an extreme best case scenario, but it's not that far from reality on a site with text content that's being used by only a handful of users. Not that 1MB/page view is impossible on a content-heavy website, but it's far from typical for somebody hosting their site on the free tier of GAE. – Kassandrakassaraba

@Kassandrakassaraba good catch. Indeed, I didn't think about client-side caching. – Flagellum

Is the 1GB outgoing is unique per GAE project or total of the account? – Franciscka