Programming Google App Engine with Python

Preface

On the Internet, popularity is swift and fleeting. A mention of your website on a popular news site can bring 300,000 potential customers your way at once, all expecting to find out who you are and what you have to offer. But if you’re a small company just starting out, your hardware and software aren’t likely to be able to handle that kind of traffic. You’ve sensibly built your site to handle the 30,000 visits per hour you’re actually expecting in your first six months. Under heavy load, such a system would be incapable of showing even your company logo to the 270,000 others that showed up to look around. And those potential customers are not likely to come back after the traffic has subsided.

The answer is not to spend time and money building a system to serve millions of visitors on the first day, when those same systems are only expected to serve mere thousands per day for the subsequent months. If you delay your launch to build big, you miss the opportunity to improve your product by using feedback from your customers. Building big early risks building something your customers don’t want.

Historically, small companies haven’t had access to large systems of servers on day one. The best they could do was to build small and hope that meltdowns wouldn’t damage their reputation as they try to grow. The lucky ones found their audience, got another round of funding, and halted feature development to rebuild their product for larger capacity. The unlucky ones, well, didn’t. ...