Item: Google Compute Engine
Rating: 9
Author: Raymond Hawkins

Overall Satisfaction with Google Compute Engine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're a small custom software company with one main web-based program which we host on Google Compute Engine. Over the years we've gained more and more users and we were having issues scaling up as we grew, sometimes slowly and sometimes rapidly. Finally our old hosting solution had a bad down period and we were forced to look elsewhere to get our software back online. Since switching to Compute Engine, we've been able to save money while scaling up as needed. It has been very reliable and overall a perfect fit for us.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Compute instances can be resized with quite minimal down time.
They offer recommendations when an instance might need to be upgraded to improve performance or downgraded to save you money.
The ability to SSH into any of your instances from any browser or mobile device works extremely well and is very useful!

Cons

The cost of bandwidth is somewhat high.

Return on Investment

It's allowed us to have almost 100% up time since switching to it.

Other Software Used

Google Cloud SQL, Google Drive, Google Analytics, FogBugz, JIRA Software, Google Hangouts

Likelihood to Recommend

Google Compute Engine is really great for web-based software that needs high availability and flexibility in scaling. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for simple website hosting under most circumstances as the bandwidth can get expensive quickly if serving large files, but even for that it's very reliable and easy to set up and get started.

Google Compute Engine Feature Ratings

Comments

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