May 29, 2008 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – Inching ever nearer to becoming a fully fledged web hosting provider, Google has announced prices for the Google App Engine options it launched recently. Google App Engine offers developers hosting space with API options to interface with the company’s regular services (Googlemail, Calendar, Adsense. etc.), meaning the next big thing to hit the Internet could very well be locked into Google.
To entice developers, the company is offering 500MB free data storage with charges for usage greater than this - 15 cents to 18 cents per GB of monthly data storage, bandwidth out of App Engine will cost 11-13 cents per month per GB of data, and bandwidth in 9-11 cents per month per GB transferred. A number of reports have also suggested that Google’s I/O Conference in San Francisco, USA (yesterday and today) will hear news that the company is due to expand its service by providing APIs for caching and image manipulation.
With around 150,000 people waiting to use Google App Engine, the company has upped the original allocation of accounts from just 10,000 to 60,000. The service is hosted on Google’s infrastructure where Python is the language of choice. According to a number of reports, more languages will be added to simplify what some have regarded as an overly complex service. Google is also upgrading its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which allows developers to debug web applications before JavaScript deployment – a process that works round some AJAX issues such as browser compatibility.
