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Comment by westonh | Hacker News Reader

From @clstokes

With today’s Google Cloud price cuts: - an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $ $35.38/month - an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month

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That's not quite a fair comparison. The $35.38 Google price takes advantage of their sustained usage discount, if the instance is running the entire month.

The EC2 price is the full rack rate. You can do better with a spot instance, or by paying up front for a 1-year or 3-year reserved instance.

It's still a stunning price drop from Google. And from my tests, the Google instances give a lot more performance than the supposedly equivalent EC2 instances.

Can you speak more to "Google instances give a lot more performance than the supposedly equivalent EC2 instances"?

For my projects, Google instances boot faster, have lower network latency, higher network throughput to storage, and more IOPS than EC2 "provisioned IOPS" volumes.

It's really amazing. I can snapshot a 1 TB volume in the US and start a new instance with it in Europe in less than 10 minutes.

Scalr did a more rigorous benchmark, details here: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compu...

There are quite a few cases where you can't or don't want to deal with your instance disappearing at any moment by design (spot) nor with an annual subscription though

I don't like having to commit to an entire year, but reserving that m3.medium brings the price down considerably.

Hopefully AWS will take a look at Google's automatic cuts and think long and hard about it. We're using AWS, but reservations are a constant point of friction for us.

See full comparison of GCE instance types vs on-demand, RI 1 year and RI 3 year here: http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/google-sl...

Digital Ocean is still cheaper.

Amazing how competition works.

Did you seriously just compare Digital Ocean to Amazon and Google?

DO is a completely different service. It's Apples to Oranges. You don't go with GC or AWS just for a bare-bones VM, you use them if you already use (or want to use) their greater portfolio of services.

If you are just using EC2 or GC for VM hosting, you are doing it wrong and are throwing away a lot of money.

And OVH (Kimsufi) is still cheaper than DO (Amazing how ...).

However AWS and GCE are not the same service at all, if you're comparing/deciding between the two based on price you're doing it wrong.

Sure it's cheaper, but DO doesn't provide consistent performance or security. Look at their past security problems with users able to read others disks or performance benchmarks for proof.

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