Deploy Web Applications on Google Servers for Free

Creating a Web Application is not too difficult for someone who knows the language, is confident of his business logic and is aware of the platform on which the application is being built. One of the problems of running a Web Application is its deployment. Here, the foremost step is to find a suitable Server, Web host which suits your requirements and is at the same time cost effective.

LAMP(Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) based applications are very popular these days due to their Open Source nature and easy availability. One can setup their own system to deploy web applications or buy Hosting for a cheap price (5$/month).

Not all developers are comfortable in PHP. Some use Python, while others prefer Java. For the latter, Google has come out with an innovative and powerful concept called Google App Engine.

What is Google App Engine?

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

Google App Engine supports apps written in several programming languages, at the moment the following are supported :

• Python
• Ruby
• Java

Is it really FREE?

Yes! App Engine costs nothing to get started. All applications can use up to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month, absolutely free. When you enable billing for your application, your free limits are raised, and you only pay for resources you use above the free levels.

When you are ready for more, you can enable billing, set a maximum daily budget, and allocate your budget for each resource according to your needs.

Features of Google App Engine

1. You can register up to 10 applications per developer account.
2. A query can return at most 1,000 results
3. When an application is called to serve a web request, it must issue a response within 30 seconds. If the application takes too long, the process is terminated and the server returns an error code to the user.
4. Mail : Applications can send email messages using App Engine’s mail service. The mail service uses Google infrastructure to send email messages.
5. MemCache : The Memcache service provides your application with a high performance in-memory key-value cache that is accessible by multiple instances of your application.
6. Image Manipulation : The Image service lets your application manipulate images. With this API, you can resize, crop, rotate and flip images in JPEG and PNG formats.
7. URL Fetch : Applications can access resources on the Internet, such as web services or other data, using App Engine’s URL fetch service.
8. You’ll get a free URL as yourapp.appspot.com , you can also point it to your own domain.

Can I Create a Site and Host it on Google App Engine for free?

Yes. You can very well create a site using little bit of python or java and serve static / dynamic pages to users. I created an online note taking application using Google App Engine.

MyTextNotes : Your writing, notes, and to-do lists online. MyTextNotes stores your text and keeps it synced between your work, home so you’ll never lose data.

Hope, this works for most. Happy developing guys.

Tagged as: Google, Web Development, Web Hosting