Hosting websites in the Cloud (GoogleAppEngine etc) or simple webhosting [closed]

Question

whats the main difference between hosting in Google through Google App Engine than hosting websites in 'normal' web hosting provider(e.g.http://webhostingworld.net/plans.php) ?

hosting in webhostingworld.net looks much cheaper (unlimited storage, bandwidth, 99.9%uptime)..so what gives ?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Basically, unlimited isn't unlimited! (skip to the line and big words below if you want to skip out a small rant/why/how unlimited providers work!)

Trust me, Some web hosts offer unlimited everything for less than $7 a month... if this was possible, Microsoft and all the other big places would use these and save millions! The fact is... it is a lie!

Most people who have a website online will get less than 10 visitors a day and take up around 50Mb of web space. They cost a few pence (if that) for a host to maintain one of these accounts.

Then, there are a few sites who may have a hundred or so visitors a day and use up ~5GBs of hard drive space... On these sort of accounts, the host may make a small profit or brake even.

Next are the Bigger sites such as game communities, popular forums etc. They may have thousands of visitors a day and take up 10GB of space. The webhosts usually make a small loss on these accounts, but they use monitoring and study logs to place these on servers where the resource usage is low - offset by the profit of lower sites

Lastly are the huge sites... When a "Bigger" site becomes to big, they will simply recommend you upgrade your account or terminate it.

Your website may be on a machine with hundreds or thousands of other sites and simply it is "hosting" but there are no guarantees.

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Now about Google and "Cloud" providers

Simply, you get what you pay for. These services do not oversell on the hopes that some people do not use their allocation, they simply will charge you for what you use and you should never be terminated for using to much... You simply pay more and get more resources.

Cloud services are expensive compared to a normal host. What I recommend you or anyone does is simply use a normal shared host if you have no special / out of the ordinary requests (if you do, either speak to a host to see if they can accommodate or go virtual private server), then if you don't mind a bit of hassle go either dedicated or colocation - if you do not want the hassle and worry about clustering, failover and all the rest - go cloud.

Answer 2

In general, generic hosting plans like the ones you're probably looking at don't set specific limits. However, they do monitor your usage and if you are consuming bandwidth or CPU at an unreasonable rate, they may force you to either upgrade your plan or suspend your account entirely.

Also, plans with low rates like $1-10 /month are shared machines: the same server that is hosting your site is also hosting dozens of other sites. Any apps you are running can only be so performant since you don't have exclusive access to your server. This another reason why "unlimited" means "unlimited within reason": if your web app is using up the entire machine's resources, then you are impacting the quality of service for their other customers.

Google App Engine is designed for web apps that don't fit in the business model of generic hosting companies. You pay for the CPU you use, but they won't throttle or suspend you if you use a lot since you're paying at a specified rate rather than an "unlimited within reason" plan.

Answer 3

One difference about Google's App Engine cloud is that it only natively supports Python and Java. It's obviously not recommended for .NET or PHP developers. The bulk of webhosts support one of those two.

Also, I think uploads are limited to 1 GB files, a size which some PDF's can easily clear.

Finally, Google, while good at many things, has a somewhat aloof (maybe snobby?) attitude towards customer service. Often I see long lists of feature requests with very limited response on their part about when or if any of them will be addressed. Most of us just want a "we're working on it" every few months. Arguably, Microsoft is the same or worse, but then again, their bread and butter is shipping packaged software which doesn't need the same attention. If Google is in a primarily service oriented business, some of those Harvard graduates will need to stoop to answering phones like the rest of us.