Expert developer on the Microsoft stack, can't decide between GAE or Microsoft stack

Question

I am creating a website with a friend to try and make some money. Basically, we want to let users aggregate data from different social networking site's APIs (FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and do some cool things with the data.

My non-developer friend is sold on the Google App Engine because it costs nothing at first, and then you pay as your traffic/data increases. I am torn. I like being able to bootstrap the business like that and have no startup costs (other than time) but I am worried about learning a whole new "programming world" as Joel Spolsky would put it.

I am so comfortable with C#, ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server that I think moving to something like Java or Python on top of BigTable would end up taking about 3x longer to develop (if not more).

Can anyone give me some guidance on this? Basically, I am wondering if there is any way I can have the following with the Microsoft stack:

1. Free hosting up to some limit of traffic
2. Ability to scale out at a cost similar to what Google offers with GAE (maybe the hosting service would need to have support for a good scalable persistence solution--like Couch DB?)

For #1, I am OK if that means hosting it on my own server for the ALPHA/BETA phases. For #2 I am hoping that there is a good hosting service out there who can put me on shared hosting servers and charge by the traffic. Does that exist? Thanks!

Answer 1

Have you looked into Windows Azure?

Answer 2

Unfortunately when it comes to a similar platform then you won't find a MS Stack version. Windows Azure comes close but this is more akin to Amazon's EC2.

The python stack in GAE is really easy to use and was able to make the transition quite quickly. Django is a MVC that is really popular and quite simple to use. It also gives you a ORM to write to BigTable which means you don't actually have to care about it.

The Java implementation is very similar and you can use really well know MVC frameworks for creating your app like Spring

Answer 3

I am also a .NET expert, but I have been using Python-AppEngine for hobby/entrepreneurial purposes specifically because it allows me to bootstrap an new web application at no initial cost. That is critical for me, as I have no budget at all for side projects, and so far, with many deployed AppEngine applications, I haven't spent a penny on it.

Learning a new language can seem like a drag at first, but I have come to find my new expertise in Python to be invaluable. Remember that the best and most employable developers are usually generalists with a broad and flexible palette of skills. My resume features C# and .NET as well as Python and Ruby/Ruby on Rails, and I have gotten very positive reaction from potential clients and employers.

Learning Python was dead easy. Getting a handle on WebOb and Django templates took more effort, but nothing extraordinary. Over time, I built up my own framework layer on top of those things that incorporates the best ideas from Rails and ASP.NET MVC that I missed. You can take a look at it on Google Code, and you will see a number of ideas that specifically borrowed from ASP.NET MVC.