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How To Host Your Personal Website On Google’s Servers

Google does not provide free hosting solutions, but they do provide a Platform As A Service (PAAS) known as Google App Engine (GAE). This tutorial uses App Engine’s ‘Static files’ feature to host a static HTML-CSS website on GAE’s servers.  Google App Engine (often referred to as GAE or simply App Engine) is a platform as a service (PaaS) cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple servers.  App Engine offers automatic scaling for web applications—as the number of requests increases for an application, App Engine automatically allocates more resources for the web application to handle the additional demand.

 

Google App Engine is free up to a certain level of consumed resources. Fees are charged for additional storage, bandwidth, or instance hours required by the application.  It was first released as a preview version in April 2008 and came out of preview in September 2011.

 

The engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google’s infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast and to offer strong consistency of performance.

 

We have hosted many projects that were completed by us in Google compute engine. forums.saltwaterfish.com is one of them. This is a hyper active forum. So we carefully calculated resources that the application would consume. We have used mod_fcgid with SU exec for Apache to strengthen security. We also have built a strong firewall that will automatically block any brute force attack. Additionally, there are automatic backup systems which back up all the data including database dumps regularly. MVI also has a monitoring system that monitors the server health continuously and we get alerts if there are any issues with the server.

 

Currently, GAE supports programming languages are Python, Java, Go, and PHP. Node.js is also available in the Managed VM environment. Google has said that it plans to support more languages in the future and that the Google App Engine has been written to be language independent.

 

Python web frameworks that run on Google App Engine include Django, CherryPy, Pyramid, Flask, web2py, and webapp2, as well as a custom Google-written web app framework and several others designed specifically for the platform that emerged since the release. Any Python framework that supports the WSGI using the CGI adapter can be used to create an application; the framework can be uploaded with the developed application. Third-party libraries written in pure Python may also be uploaded.

 

Google App Engine supports many Java standards and frameworks. Core to this is the servlet 2.5 technology using the open-source Jetty Web Server, along with accompanying technologies such as JSP.  Though the data store used may be unfamiliar to programmers, it is easily accessed and supported with JPA. JDO and other methods of reading and writing data are also provided. The Spring Framework works with GAE, however, the Spring Security module requires workarounds. Apache Struts 1 is supported, and Struts 2 runs with workarounds.

 

The Django web framework and applications running on it can be used on App Engine with modification. Django-nonrenal  aims to allow Django to work with non-relational databases and the project includes support for App Engine