Cloudways vs. Google Compute Engine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cloudways
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
Cloudways, by DigitalOcean, offers a range of managed hosting solutions, including managed Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and others, with a choice of infrastructure providers and media delivery via CloudwaysVPN, and CloudwaysBot notification system.
$10
per month
Google Compute Engine
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.
$0
per month GB
Pricing
CloudwaysGoogle Compute Engine
Editions & Modules
Starting Price
$10.00
per month
Maximum Price
$274.33
per month
Preemptible Price - Predefined Memory
0.000892 / GB
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.001907 / GB
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.002669 / GB
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined Memory
$0.004237 / GB
Hour
Preemptible Price - Predefined vCPUs
0.006655 / vCPU
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.014225 / CPU
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.019915 / vCPU
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.031611 / vCPU
Hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CloudwaysGoogle Compute Engine
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup Fee$25 per applicationNo setup fee
Additional DetailsCloudways offers 1 free migration to all customers. For any further migration needs the customer can use our free WordPress migration plugin and do it themselves. Or they can request paid migration services for any PHP based application, which start at $25 per application.Prices vary according to region (i.e US central, east, & west time zones). Google Compute Engine also offers a discounted rate for a 1 & 3 year commitment.
More Pricing Information
Features
CloudwaysGoogle Compute Engine
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Cloudways
-
Ratings
Google Compute Engine
7.1
59 Ratings
13% below category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.125 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.454 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings8.049 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings6.556 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings3.026 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings6.758 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings7.759 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings7.658 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings7.92 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CloudwaysGoogle Compute Engine
Small Businesses
Flywheel
Flywheel
Score 9.9 out of 10
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 8.3 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.5 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CloudwaysGoogle Compute Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(5 ratings)
7.7
(59 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(22 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(22 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(2 ratings)
10.0
(10 ratings)
User Testimonials
CloudwaysGoogle Compute Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
DigitalOcean
When you dont know how to set up a cloud server technically, (The LAMP stack or the PHP settings etc) Cloudways comes handy. You can easily modify the server settings with one click.
Less Appropriate - If you want to save costs, go for direct cloud providers. Setting up technical stuff is a one time job.
Read full review
Google
You can use Google Cloud Compute Engine as an option to configure your Gitlab, GitHub, and Azure DevOps self-hosted runners. This allows full control and management of your runners rather than using the default runners, which you cannot manage. Additionally, they can be used as a workspace, which you can provide to the employees, where they can test their workloads or use them as a local host and then deploy to the actual production-grade instance.
Read full review
Pros
DigitalOcean
  • Automatic Daily One Click Restore Backups
  • Integrated CDN
  • Easy & Intuitive Alternate Interface to cPanel and WHM
  • Very Affordable for High Specs
  • 24/7 Customer Support is Extremely Helpful
  • Serve & Application Management is a Breeze
  • Choose from Multiple Server Locations
Read full review
Google
  • Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
  • Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
  • Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs
Read full review
Cons
DigitalOcean
  • More flexible notifications
Read full review
Google
  • Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
  • Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
  • Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Google
Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.
Read full review
Usability
DigitalOcean
They are constantly improving their dashboards and interface to make it easier to use and find the things that we use the most. It's a lot of features to pack in to one UI and they have done a great job of making it user friendly. Their layout is intuitive and easy to learn and is extremely granular. We are able to control every aspect of our websites and applications from an individual level from scaling, to cache, to DNS, security, WAF, and everything in between.
Read full review
Google
Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.
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Reliability and Availability
DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Google
Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes
Read full review
Performance
DigitalOcean
No answers on this topic
Google
It works great all the time except for occasional issues, but overall, I am very happy with the performance. It delivers on the promise it makes and as per the SLAs provided. Networking is great with a premium network, and AZs are also widespread across geographies. Overall, it is a great infra item to have, which you can scale as you want.
Read full review
Support Rating
DigitalOcean
Technical support is just 2-3 clicks away and the Cloudways homepage and the operators are available almost 24/7. They also are able to answer any kind of question related to their services, whether economical or technical. I sometimes made mistakes while using their services and they have been keen to help me, and fixed my problems really fast.
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Google
  • The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
  • Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
DigitalOcean
Whilst all the top hosting companies have good customer service. Hostinger is the winner here for me. SiteGround has fast servers, but fees increase significantly in year two. CloudWays has excellent support at a lower price than SiteGround. They win over the other two companies because they make it very simple to manage site hosting, specifically for VPS/cloud hosting. You do not need to be as technical as you would if you're a customer of Hostinger and SiteGround. So, in short, for a fast-growing website with 6k+ sessions per month (low WP maintenance experience), I'd choose Cloudways.
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Google
Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.
Read full review
Return on Investment
DigitalOcean
  • We were able to reduce load on our main server.
  • By migrating social sentiment platform to cloudways, we were able to scale and run it effeciently.
  • It saved lot of time as well in terms of server management.
Read full review
Google
  • With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
  • As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Cloudways Screenshots

Screenshot of Managed ServicesScreenshot of Team Management

Google Compute Engine Screenshots

Screenshot of How to choose the right VM
With thousands of applications, each with different requirements, which VM is right for you?Screenshot of documentation, guides, and reference architectures
Migration Center is Google Cloud's unified migration platform with features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios.