Congratulations on an income-generating project! That's an immense achievement. Perhaps the infrastructure cost is worth the headaches you spare yourself by being on GAE but have you looked at dedicated infrastructure from the likes of OVH/Hetzner (on both providers you can get ~2TB storage/64GB mem boxes for around $100/mo)? I moved all my projects to a single OVH box and it's been a champ. It does mean slightly more maintenance burden (ex you need to roll your own backup/restore plan). Perhaps it is a poor fit but that seems like a possible path to get those costs way under control
Have to agree. Great article but it just confirmed my decision to stay away from app engine. What's the purpose of paying for something that's both harder to use and more costly than a traditional server? Datastore is great but I can get the benefits at a quarter of the price. At least with Heroku you have something that's easier to use.
