This week Google launched a new product called AppEngine, which aims to provide a hosting solution for web developers completely free of charge. I entered the private alpha testing and am still awaiting my applications approval.
In the meantime I have been perusing the documentation they have provided. On the surface I think the program is a great option for developers out there that lack resources to get their product out the door. Even though bandwidth and hardware is getting cheaper everyday, running a public website/application can be very expensive depending on the scalability of the features. So this service is a great fit for that situation.
Right now they only seem to support the Python language, but if Google’s history of Open Source tells us anything then I think we can expect PHP/Java/Ruby to follow in the near future. We are primarily LAMP developers here so having PHP support would be nice to see. I would be very interested in checking it out for some of our coming applications.