Google App Engine quota reached on test site. What am I doing wrong?

Question

First off, I'm totally new to GAE. 3 days ago I did a search on Google for hosting a website on Google App Engine for free. I found this tutorial on labnol.org:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/host-website-on-google-app-engine/18801/

I was under the impression that GAE's quota for free users was high. My site has received very little traffic. At best, the site is getting 50 daily page views, of which most, if not all, are mine. I'm testing my code on and refreshing my browser.

GAE indicates the following: Frontend Instance Hours - 100% - 28.00 of 28.00 Instance Hours

I made no adjustments to my GAE settings UNTIL this morning. 2 things changed in the last 12 hours:

1. I changed my frontend instance class from the default f1 to f4. My reason for doing so was to see if it would improve my site's loading time (it didn't). My site is a fairly small and simple site.

2. I replaced the html files and images from the last 2 days with fresh ones this morning. Doing this resulted in my making some changes to files and uploading (deploying via GoogleAppEngineLauncher Mac app) changes probably about 5 times per hour.

On my settings page everything is at 0, with the exception of this one:

Frontend Instance Hours 100% 28.00 of 28.00 Instance Hours

How did I reach the hosting quota for GAE? Should I adjust any other settings? What can I do to prevent this from happening in the future?

Additional facts:

• The size of the folder containing all my files is 38kb in size.
• I have Google Analytics, by way of Javascript, running on index.html (none of the other pages).
• I'm using raw, basic, html.
• my pages consist of approximately 3kb of image data being served per page.

Thanks

Answer 1

If your website consists of largely static content, I highly recommend you implement Frontend Caching. This should drastically cut down your instance hours as the majority of it would be served off Google's frontend servers.

For every page that's served from cache, you'll see a 204 logged in AppEngine. See also this talk on scaling GAE apps.

Note that there's also the option of using memcache within your app, but briefly looking at that tutorial link, I suspect this won't apply to you.