I host my personal website GAE. One thing to be aware of is when moving to a personal domain, you need to map to a subdomain so you can't use a naked domain[1] (e.g. '<a href="http://github.com'" rel="nofollow">http://github.com'</a>). You have to map to something like 'www.'<p>[1] <a href="https://developers.google.com/appengine/kb/general#naked_domain" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/appengine/kb/general#naked_dom...</a>
Did a quick comparison with my own service, BitBalloon.<p>On appengine you're just deploying a dynamic app that just routes everything to a static folder, but since Google doesn't know this is a static site, it's pretty limited what they can do to set good cache headers and optimize stuff for performance. So even if they have an awesome infrastructure, BitBalloon will make your site perform better.<p>Here's the quick test result from the same site uploaded to AppEngine and BitBalloon:<p><a href="http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/vLi9d/http://teststaticsite.appspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/vLi9d/http://teststaticsite....</a>
<a href="http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dwqwvX/http://speedtest.bitballoon.com" rel="nofollow">http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dwqwvX/http://speedtest.bitb...</a>
GitHub Pages is even easier to set up, and does support naked domains (although to use their CDN it is limited to DNS providers that support ALIAS records) -- <a href="https://github.com/blog/1715-faster-more-awesome-github-pages" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/blog/1715-faster-more-awesome-github-page...</a>
Is there a way to redirect all[1] requests to index.html? The use case is an Ember app that uses history location and is deployed as a static website. In this case, requests to `/whatever` still need to serve index.html and let Ember handle the routing. Can GAE app.yaml specify rules like this?<p>I ran into this problem with S3 and ended up writing a simple server to handle it and deploying to Heroku.<p>[1] By all, I mean all except the ones to /assets or something similar.
If you want mostly free hosting I built this a long time ago. <a href="http://www.cdninabox.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cdninabox.com/</a> it mirrors any site with caching using Google Edge cache.<p>Because it will handle URL Re-Writes you can host on any host in a subdirectory and still have it be your root for the customer.<p>I mostly abandoned this when Google Launched "PageSpeed" for appengine which was too much a direct competitor. Also when they moved to AppsForDomains you could no longer have a naked domain, and that was annoying. I don't like www. having to be on the front of my URL.
From years back, there was a tool created called DryDrop[1] that allows you to publish static GAE sites via GitHub push.<p>[1] <a href="http://drydrop.binaryage.com/" rel="nofollow">http://drydrop.binaryage.com/</a>
Somewhat related, I've recently found and evaluated nodejs static site generators (including ghost which I find vastly overhyped and still too stuck in wordpress way of doing things). And the relatively unknown wintersmith [1] is just so awesome that it really needs some mention. It's easy to get started, relatively well documented compared to others, and you have full control to extend it should you need to.<p>[1] <a href="http://wintersmith.io" rel="nofollow">http://wintersmith.io</a>
Putting up a landing page for a 'parked' domain name would be a great use of this. Rather than letting your registrar put up a page where they make money off of the clicks.
I have my personal site hosted on Google App Engine too. Must say its sleek and simple. I had evaluated a lot of other (typical) options like EC2, Dropbox(S3) and even Github pages. Nothing came close to the ease and the performance that GAE gives. Benchmarking about 10 URLs on my site, returned an a.r.t of 3.5ms aggregate on GAE vs 5.6 ms on EC2.