Benchmarks Benchmarks Google Cloud Platform - Various Configs and Locations

Okay, it was a thread on here that pointed me in the direction of Google Cloud Platform for hosting. The main reason is that they credit you with $300 for new accounts and that credit lasts for 12 months.

My first thoughts were that I'd be able to get 6-7 months hosting for free on this deal. However the results are really disappointing considering the monthly costs especially when you compare them to other benchmarks posted here that are a fraction of the cost (I'm thinking of the HostUS special and Hetzner).

Anyway, I'm going to test a number of locations with two basic specs. All instances will use CentOS 7.0 and the 123.09beta01 installer.

Location: North America Northeast 1a (Montreal) - 1 CPU, 3.75GB Ram, 50 GB SSD

Monthly cost is $36.08 (I don't think this includes bandwidth costs though)





So that's 49 seconds slower than the OVH instance I benchmarked. This instance has more RAM (3.75GB vs 2GB) and is 7 times more expensive than the OVH instance.

Are they having a laugh? What am I missing here?

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Location: Europe West 2a (London) - 1 CPU, 3.75GB Ram, 50 GB SSD

Monthly cost is $41.47.

 

Location: North America East 4a (N. Virginia) - 1 CPU, 3.75GB Ram, 50 GB SSD

Monthly cost is $36.69

 

Thanks for the clarification. Those prices are insane! I get that I'm not their target demographic but they seem ridiculously overpriced. Anyway 1 TB of traffic would be around 1 million page views for a 1Mb page which is the typical size of a page on my production site. I'm lucky if I hit 10k page views in a month so traffic costs for me should be in the $1.2 - $1.7 range. But yeah, if it wasn't for the $300 free credit I wouldn't be investigating this.

 

Ok, so this is where it gets more more interesting, for me at least. I'm going to test those same locations (Montreal, N. Virginia and London) with an increased spec. Google refer to it as a n1-standard-2 instance which gives you 2 CPU's and 7.5GB Ram. I've kept the SSD the same size at 50GB.

Location: North America Northeast 1c (Montreal) - 2 CPU, 7.5GBGB Ram, 50 GB SSD

Monthly cost is $62.80





I really expected to see a decent improvement here but no it's really poor. My OVH instance benchmark comes in 11 seconds faster with 5.5 GB less RAM. At roughly $4.95 per month it's a twelfth of the price of this google instance.

 

I hear you. The benchmarks are not good enough for me to move anything onto them at the moment. I'd expect these sort of benchmark results from some cowboy 'Host4Less' type outfit but not Google and certainly not at these prices.

 

Yeah, I get the SLA thing but these scores are really terrible for the price point. I'd rather have a 1 month trial of a service that behaves the way it should than 12 months of a waste of everyone's time. If Linode offered 2CPU with 7.5GB Ram and displayed these benchmarks they'd get slaughtered.

As you say, it's all marketing.

 

Location: North America East 4c (N. Virginia) - 2 CPU, 7.5GBGB Ram, 50 GB SSD

Monthly cost is $64.03





So, guess what, this is 93 seconds slower than a lower spec instance in the same region tested above. Only 1 more benchmark to go.

 

Location: Europe West 2b (London) - 2 CPU, 7.5GBGB Ram, 50 GB SSD

Monthly cost is $72.75





Ok, so at least it wasn't as bad as the last benchmark but again it's terrible considering the specification and the monthly cost.

If anyone does sign-up to the free trial heed the warning from @eva2000

 

All very true but we're talking semantics. If someone like Linode offered those benchmarks consistently for that spec of instance then direct competitors would simply erode their market share over time. As you say though, Google are not a direct competitor for the reasons you outline and I do acknowledge that fact further up the thread.