Google App Engine as a simple website hosting platform

When I first learnt about the Google App Engine infrastructure, it was clear to me that it was a solid application development platform. And I started playing with it with that viewpoint. Pretty soon it became clear that it is a simple but solid web site hosting platform as well. I say simple because as of today you can do a certain things, but not all (it is not as flexible as the Amazon EC2 platform - which is in my view more of a raw iron platform, offering extreme flexibility for legacy applications). In order to offer the high-level frictionless service provisioning and the abstractions and assumptions that go with it, Google App Engine is an extremely managed environment. And that is a good thing. So we at CloudGlow decided to do that precisely. CloudGlow.com uses Google App Engine as both an application hosting platform as well as to host the static website. Best of all, given owr low usage statistics we get all the high availability and Google power for free. I feel Amazon should offer a zero cost starter option for small guys, to let them build and test out. The benefits [to Amazon and the developer community] will surpass the incremental cost to Amazon, in my view anyway.