Question

I’m working on an android app which would connect to a web server which would power a social network and data store inside the app. Recently we decided that we would use a landing page and pre-order page to try and try and market our app before we launch.

Right now I’m working to create the landing page and I ran into a whole host of problems. Namely, that we would need a landing/pre-order page that would tie into the social network and would run off the same set of usernames/emails (we need to honor discounts/ deals). I’ve spent the whole day looking at our options and I came to the conclusion that

1. Static hosts (probably) wont work for what we are doing. We would need a cloud host
2. I only have previous experience in Windows Azure but the cost is prohibitive.
3. Any host that I choose would require a significant time investment.

So I’m at a complete loss. I took a look at Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, and a few other hosts like Heroku and Linode and realized I would have to spend at least a day or two working just on learning the workings of the services to effectively use them. So the tl;dr is: I need to pick and choose a single webhost to host a back end for an android app and my website. Which host should I pick?

Answer 1

GAE has two big advantages for this case:

1. It’s free: for the description of what you want, it does not seem that you’ll be over the free quota, at leas at the beginning.
2. You can write it in java, which means reusing a lot of code in the final android app.