When Written: April 2008
Hosting is always an issue for any web developer, sometimes the technologies that you can use are limited to what ever your hosting provider provide. It would be foolish to host an untried technology on your company’s web server just in case it brings down your main web site ( unlikely, but it could expose a security vunerability which a hacker might exploit ).
But not all of us have the luxury of a rack with our own servers in and free reign as to what technologies we run on them. I am fortunate in this respect to rent a full rack at Merula ( www.merula.net) so can play to my heart’s content with various servers. If you do not have access to such facilities or perhaps you need more computing power than your servers/bandwidth can supply then the latest offering from Google might be of interest. Google is offering free hosting for your web applications at http://appengine.google.com .
These have to be written in Python but there is also a datastore, user and email APIs so you have most of what you need to get going. Google say that they can serve around 5 million monthly pageviews per application, so this should be enough for most uses, but obviously not adequate to host a very active web site, but hey! It is free! The service is currently open only to the first 100,000 users who sign up for it, but this will expand.
Google is now starting to offer free hosting for your Python based web app
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton