What are the pros and cons of hosting a social network (that in most probability will grow a lot quickly)on Google AppEngine?

I have been reading up a lot on cloud hosting and how AWS is awesome. Also this Pros & Cons of Google App Engine. I feel th开发者_如何学JAVAe above is pretty outdated. I have been deploying a lot on AppEngine and have had the best experience I could have had. Now I wish to set up a social network on AppEngine but everyone is against this decision and want me to look into rackspace and AWS.

Hence I wanted to know what kind of problems I can expect to face if I stick with AppEngine and what are the advantages of its competitors?

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I think the biggest problem with App Engine is, that technology will dictate your solution, instead of your solution dictating the technologies to use.

Also, if you have the model figured out, I would suggest to try it out with sample data. Set up a prototpye which put some data in the datastore and see how get, put and query operations perform on that model and how much storage is consumed (if you use list properties to store friends for example, you could be in for a surprise, when users have large lists).

Also, think about the typical profile of a user that you would anticipate, and make some back-of-the envelope calculation what that would mean in terms of quota consumption (storage, bandwidth, mails etc.), keeping the recently announced price structure in mind.

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First you should find a way to construct a "friend web". There is an open source that able to do this, but as long as I remember, you cant put the jar inside Google Apps Engine because it spawns a new thread. I forgot the name of the project.

However you may want to learn from SocialWok since they already create a social network on the top of Google Apps Engine. SocialWok Link