Started on app engine. I've been using and happy with it for 4 years.
Yes, I could set up a simple psql stack. But I would lose automatic multi data center replication and infinite scaling, so that's not a win. My database hit 500GB in a few months. I don't want to deal with scaling up psql instances when it doubles in size over the next year again. See my first post linked below about when newsblur hit the HN frontpage and was effectively down for 3 days due to load. It's because psql doesn't scale in that direction.
Thanks for elucidating - I work on sites with a different balance of users vs traffic and data (maybe more users but less data and not so spiky), so it's interesting to hear about your experience on that and why you'd go for app engine, which compared to self hosting can seem like an expensive option.
Yes, I could set up a simple psql stack. But I would lose automatic multi data center replication and infinite scaling, so that's not a win. My database hit 500GB in a few months. I don't want to deal with scaling up psql instances when it doubles in size over the next year again. See my first post linked below about when newsblur hit the HN frontpage and was effectively down for 3 days due to load. It's because psql doesn't scale in that direction.
http://mattjibson.com/blog/2013/06/26/go-read-open-source-go...