Have you ever been on-call for any project larger than a toy? If you have, you likely noticed that keeping the whole thing up sometimes takes effort, more effort than meets the eye.
Hosting as in having some code deployed to some machines is indeed cheap. Keeping a large app like g.docs up and running, especially without breaking the bank, is a bit more tricky.
> Have you ever been on-call for any project larger than a toy? If you have, you likely noticed that keeping the whole thing up sometimes takes effort, more effort than meets the eye.
Of course, that applies to literally every piece of production software ever, but keeping a webpapp running really isn't that hard, it's honestly the bare minimum of competent software development, if you have a team of SREs up at 3am triaging the site every night you're doing something wrong. Now of course, when you get to google scale, you will encounter unique problems, but if you're at google scale your business has more than enough revenue to pay for the costs.
My experience as well. Web apps - if made slightly streamlined and lightweight - with thousands of visitors a month is easy peasy on cheap webhosting.
Google is another scale ofcourse. That's like comparing elephants with mosquitos.
Hosting as in having some code deployed to some machines is indeed cheap. Keeping a large app like g.docs up and running, especially without breaking the bank, is a bit more tricky.