Posted on 2010-02-20
When Google AppEngine (GAE) first came out, I thought it would be a great way to host some side projects that I had on FileFormat.Info that were too small to be worth setting up a whole server for, but could really use their own domain name & identity.
Unfortunately, GAE has some pretty severe limitations in terms of the standard Java classes. I use the iText library, and managed to get it to work in AppEngine, but the missing classes mean custom colors and fonts don't work. Since the point of LabelMakr was to print nice looking labels, including colors and fonts, I never really used the GAE version.
Finally I saw an article comparing VPS hosts and decided to give Linode a try. Well, it has worked out very well. The signup process at Linode was trivial. Ubuntu installation was a breeze and the server is setup exactly the way I want. And the kicker is performance. This is a graph from Google's Webmaster Tools, showing how long GoogleBot takes to download a page:
Tags: appengine hosting