Google Compute Engine vs. SiteGround

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.

Incentivized

If you've got a WordPress site and are unhappy with the performance, support or price of your current hosting service, SiteGround is well worth checking out as it excels in all those areas. From a single one-off blog, to more robust hosting packages, they offer a range of options that are well-suited to any budget or service need. Everybody, from noobs to experienced developers needs support from time to time, and SiteGround's team is the best I've seen. Not only are they easy to communicate with and highly proficient to solve any issue I've thrown their way, they're also easy to reach with multiple access options with minimal wait times.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• You get a number of page views as a guide to your bandwidth, and a fixed amount of disk space on the server. So you know what you have to work with. No hazy promises of “unlimited” resources.
• If you pay more, you’re allocated a server with fewer accounts, so there’s less chance you’ll be slowed down by your neighbors.
• Its self-help material is pretty good — close to InMotion Hosting for knowledgebase quality.
• SiteGround tackles slow speeds from all angles, using SSD storage, Nginx, SuperCacher, CloudFlare CDN, and HHVM.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Business model and clarity about prices after the second year
• Server Performance when it's stressed or under a big volume of traffic
• Upgrading model. Sometimes I felt like it was mandatory to update and pay more for basic needs, even with low traffic volumes

Incentivized

Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

There were some very few cases where we had an outage but mostly it did not last more than 10 minutes. And if there were any maintenance, we were notified beforehand. So did not have any major problem with Google Compute Engine's availability.

GCE is a performant infrastructure. The GCE usage reports are readily available and the reports load time is insignificant. GCE exposes various REST API which allows the third part system to integrate with GCE. Many observability software like newRelic integrates with the GCE to offer monitoring of GCE

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

I don't feel stress about the website and emails hosted with SiteGround. I like the customer/tech support, the agents are always polite and ready to find a solution. My websites are secure and has a free SSL certificate - I can get on with my business. The boost in speed to the webpage loads is a big bonus especially when designing and developing websites online. They also provide tips and how to videos on various topics which is valuable learning tool.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I used Namescheap in the past. I believe Namescheap is a big company compared to SiteGround, as big as godaddy. I think because of that, you get what you expect. Good services, but maybe more costly and you have to pay for everything as extra. Email $5, SSL $10, CDN $10 etc In my opinion, SiteGround actually has packages that make sense for wordpress hosting. If my website gets a lot of traction in the future, I will need to upgrade from the current plan and maybe move away from SiteGround.

• 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.

Incentivized

• All the sites I've set up at SiteGround are performing faster than they did at their previous hosting provider. This yields a superior customer experience and higher Google/SEO rankings.
• Their service has been rock solid, necessitating little support (which is admittedly less than ideal for my support business, but a boon for my clients bottom line) and zero downtime.
• Easy to get new sites up and running, which speeds creation of new businesses and rapid deployment of conceptual campaigns.

Incentivized