Likelihood to Recommend Google Compute Engine is so easy to implement and run. It doesn't require much knowledge to build an app since they provide multiple options to choose from with their prebuilt sample list. We can easily make customization on any website app we built for our client according to their needs and make changes if required.
Read full review Rackspace is very well suited as a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider, particularly when you're planning on leaving the infrastructure up for a period of time. They seem to focus a bit more on that aspect of infrastructure. That is to say, they seem to promote running servers for longer periods of time and not spinning up/shutting down servers frequently based on usage spikes. While, they do support that sort of availability -- they don't have features built into their offering, necessarily, that make it a lot easier to implement. Our experiences with Rackspace have been 100% around their cloud platform, but they have another entire part of their business that is centered around hosting/maintaining/supporting physical hardware (bare metal). They have had a great reputation over the last several years (10+) for being top-notch providers in this space, which is one reason we even considered them for our Cloud-based hosting needs. We don't have any direct experience with their "bare metal" offerings, but their reputation is certainly great, and worth noting.
Read full review Pros 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 Fanatical Support - I can't stress how great their team is. Not only are they knowledgeable, whenever I call in (during the day or in the middle of the night), I never have to wait more than a minute to speak to someone. Webmail, Hosted Exchange, and Office365 Support - As an IT team of one, Rackspace's cloud solution and migration team has really helped me over the years to minimize issues for users, but also provide a reliable and flexible email platform. Read full review Cons 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 Latest outage 12/2/22 and counting over 75 hours - in my opinion, support has been miserable. In my experience, there's little/no communication regarding the problem or cause. No support. In my opinion, erroneous advice. Virtually NOTHING for users. I feel we've been abandoned. Outage appears to have been caused by unpatched servers & no backup servers In my opinion, NO COMPANY should trust their data or services to a nonresponsive company like Rackspace. In my experience, there are NO published policies/practices re: server maintenance (patching) to mitigate hacking, NO published policies/practices re: backup servers in the event of problems. I feel it's stupid of me as a user to have chosen to trust them with critical services Read full review Likelihood to Renew Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.
Read full review If I wake tomorrow completely incapable of managing a client cloud operation, our dedicated Rackspace Cloud Engineering Team is deployable as literal extension of our business, immediately addressing all needs and requirements without cause of business disruption for our consultancy, and more importantly for the mission-critical ones of our clients. For this reason alone, Rackspace is our choice of choices!
Read full review Usability 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.
Brendon Brown Business IT, Web Development, eCommerce and Digital Marketing
Read full review The company does not put as much focus on usability as other cloud competitors and it is kind of clear. It would be good to take a quarter and gather intense feedback, and then another quarter and focus purely on UI enhancements and backend interoperability
Read full review Reliability and Availability GCE is highly available system. So far we have not experienced any planned or unplanned outages. We do experience application errors however they are not GCE reated. GCE provides us with wide ranges of option to make systems highly available like block storage, global load balancing, GPU accelerators and Machine Managers which manages different VMs.
Read full review Performance It's good in terms of Performance, as compared to other VMs or Compute Engine Services by other providers. Google Compute Engine integrates seamlessly with other Google Cloud Platform services, allowing users to leverage a wide range of tools and services without significant performance degradation.
Read full review Support Rating 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 In my experience, their support team is massively overworked — taking FOUR DAYS to look at tickets, and a MONTH to fix problems!
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 LiquidWeb or Amazon both offer some products that could be considered similar. I will say though, after years of dealing with Rackspace, their service is what always has me coming back. Their support is typically so much better than other vendors that I hesitate to use other vendors. Pricing might be cheaper, but when you have an issue and need it resolved ASAP, then Rackspace has come through in the majority of cases for me.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 We've found it helpful to host our own web sites on their cloud servers, which is a positive. We've also hosted our Nagios instance on a low-end cloud server, which is also a positive. A negative impact is that they've now decided to start charging for their support. Read full review ScreenShots Google Compute Engine Screenshots