App Engine - is it better to have multiple clone sites in one app, or one app per site?

Question

I'm making an App Engine site that I don't want to be nationwide, but rather have one app site per city.

The sites will all have the same functionality, but will have different templates to localise them to the city.

If there is a bug fix or an update of the sites later on, I will want to update all sites simultaneously, and so a script could be written that does this, or I could simply host them all as one app on App Engine, and build into the app the notion of having different templates for different cities.

1. If I host different cities as different apps, is this against Google's rules?
2. Is it conceptually better to host the sites as one, rather than several separate sites?

At the moment I'm thinking that it might be better to host them all as one app, to make updating and controlling them easier.

Answer 1

This should be a single app with different templates. Site replication of this sort would be a huge pain if you ask me.

A good example of what you're trying to do can be done in Django using the Sites framework that comes with it. It lets you split up a lot of your functionality based on site IDs. They originally did this so they could share Washington Post articles with their sister papers without having to duplicate data across each site. Both sites used the same functionality, but had different templates and often different articles.

Fashioning something similar in App Engine would be more than possible.

Answer 2

Hosting multiple identical apps in a manner that avoids or decreases billing is explicitly against the Terms of Service. For that reason alone, running a single site is a good idea.