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Google Cloud Platform free for 60 days

cloud.google.com

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Google has to do something extraordinary to prove it can provide adequate support. It's support reputation is absolutely abysmal - why would I build a business on system of a company that tries to not have human contact?

https://cloud.google.com/support/ https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/3420056?hl=en&ref_to... https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/3466163?hl=en&ref_to...

Google's support for GCE is no different than Amazon's for EC2 - the more you pay, the more support you get.

This is not doing something extraordinary. My greatest hesitation with Google is being left high and dry in the event of a problem and having to pay big money to MAYBE get a response through God knows what support channel in God knows how much time. Google has to do something fuckin amazing to dispel cynicsm about their support. Your links do nothing like that.

Google thinks it just has to be a clone of amAzon in all ways.

And what would qualify as "fuckin amazing" in your book? Seeing as you apparently have not even tried it out.

Last month, I noticed their whole cloud domain returned 503 for several hours. Google gce uptime, google has nothing except a page of legalese. Yaaa....

I use GCP and the support I've gotten with a silver plan (their lowest) has been surprisingly good. Low priority stuff like bug reports have been forwarded to developers and occasionally fixed.

High priority tickets I've seen a very good response time on (far better than the minimum guaranteed), though I am going to upgrade to the next level plan to get better response times on the weekend.

I have not used AWS support so I can't compare, but GCP support has been pretty good in my experience.

Merely being a customer is not enough though, without a paid support plan you're basically on your own. This might be standard for cloud providers though from what I can tell.

AWS has a good community. Google cloud hasn't.

Agreed. I was once wronged by Google Checkout (before it closed, obviously). I couldn't get any response at all from the company, so I called a few numbers and eventually a random developer at Google looked up and gave me the name and phone number for the director of Google Checkout. I posted the number in a few forums where other incredibly frustrated merchants were looking for help.

Instead of getting some people to respond to the messages these people apparently left, within a day, the number was disconnected. That is how they tend to deal with customer service issues.

Not to defend Google's attitude towards customer service, but you do realize it's inappropriate to post someone's work phone number as a public-facing custom support line, right?

How can you possibly think that was the right thing to do here?

When you see countless stories about small businesses being seriously damaged by a service, it's hard to not want to try to help them.

In no world would what you did help them. Poor judgement.

Google's support for business customers are entirely different from those for free customers. Which isn't really particularly surprising, given the vastly different scales at which they operate.

I've used Google support in 3 different areas:

1 Google apps (paid), there is a phone number to call. I spent several hours on the phone with a very knowledgeable person helping me troubleshoot a sync issue.

2 Hardware, my android watch died. I called the Google play support number, again talked to a very knowledgeable person who gave me a couple of troubleshooting steps, and then promptly replaced the watch.

3 Google adwords. We regularly talk to people at Google adwords, regarding billing and support issues. I also work with people who speak with support people for Google places (or my business or whatever they're calling it today)

In my experience, Google tech support is great when it's for a product you're paying for. That would be my concern getting 60 days free here... If I was using this for business (and not just messing around) I'd rather just pay for it and know I can get support.

Even paying for Google Cloud is no guarantee of a reliable, robust service. Previous thread on this at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8784356

I use Google's Pagespeed Service, which is free and in beta. They say they may charge some day. But the support... I have "proxy errors" reported, which would appear to be an error on their end. Contacted support via email and was told to expect a response within 3 business days. So that was Thursday morning, it'll be at least 96 hours before I get a reply. Maybe up to 120 hours. Glad I moved the site instead of waiting.

This has been around for quite sometime[1].

It's also cool to note that there are usually free credits involved in most Google Cloud competitions and some Google Udacity courses. Off the top of my head, I think I might have enjoyed a total of about $3000 since 2013.

Oh and there's the $100000 for Startups[2] that'd be cool to get at some point in time.

1: [http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/11/google-cloud...]

2: [https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/]

I signed up for this last month. Apparently only most things are free, as I got a bill for $4 after one month. I tried contacting support to figure out what's up with that. I haven't heard back yet.

The submission's title is somewhat misleading, it's $300 in credit to use for 60 days. Comparing to other IaaS trials this is better than Azure[1], the same amount but less time as vCloud Air[2], and difficult to compare directly with AWS[3].

[N.B. I work on vCloud Air]

[1] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/

[2] http://vcloud.vmware.com/service-offering/special-offer

[3] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/free-trial/

If you apply to BizSpark and are accepted then you get up to $150/month Azure credit for 3 years. Amazing deal, and it induced me to become a Microsoft customer (I bought a Windows 8.1 laptop, subscribed to Office 365). Seriously, if you have a business idea that you want to develop apply to BizSpark. They have good support for Linux VPSs as well as useful APIs.

I work for vCloud Air too. Nice to see you on HN Matthew :)

If you are getting started with Google cloud and looking for apps (WordPress, Drupal, etc) or dev environments (Rails, Node.js, PHP, etc.) give a try to the free Google Cloud Launchpad http://google.bitnami.com (Disclaimer, I am one of the founders)

For new customers only, apparently.

I've signed up for some of Google's cloud services in the past, but not their IaaS stuff, and never as a paid account. I wonder if it's safe to create a new account to get this free trial, or will that just risk getting my account banned?

I find Google Cloud ridiculously expensive.

I can get a VPS for $1.5 per month and it will have 50GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 2 CPU cores, 1 Gbps link.

Google Cloud's cheapest server, f1-micro, costs $7.3/month, comes with 0.6GB RAM, a shared CPU, and zero storage.

which VPS provider?

http://lowendbox.com/blog/boltvm-18year-1gb-and-36year-2gb-o...

That's just an example. There are even cheaper ones out there.

That's actually pretty big apples and oranges, not including the difference between a relatively static VM and on-demand instances (GCE, EC2).

It's OpenVZ, not KVM so you're getting a container, not a VM. That might be better for some people, or make no difference, but it's a important distinction. You're stuck with the host's kernel. This can make distro choice/upgrade interesting. RAM overcommit on the host side is easier, etc.

You aren't buying 50GB of SSD storage. You're buying 50GB of RAID10 spinning disk with SSD cache.

No mention if 1Gbps uplink is the host's uplink or if you get 1Gbps uplink out of a link bundle on the server. Given the other things, I'd suspect host has 1 or 2 GigE connections that you're sharing. That could be a big deal if one VM can saturate a significant portion of the server's network capacity.

I'm sure it's fine for a normal blog, secondary DNS server, or something like that but once you go below ~$5/mo on low-end VM/container hosting there tend to be gotchas.

> I can get a VPS for $1.5 per month and it will have 50GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 2 CPU cores, 1 Gbps link.

Please share.

Maybe Google just has to be more honest than yet another VPS provider. How can the CPU you get for 1.5 per month not be shared for example?

Do the others provide an SLA and have a concrete ToS? I wouldn't have a problem trusting Google with my prod servers.

Generally cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud aren't about the specs you can get in a machine though, but about being able to deploy, resize and manage machines at scale; if you only need a single box of course you're better off with a VPS.

I find both AWS and GC incredibly difficult to estimate what it will cost. Their cost calculators have so many fields they may as well be random number generators. Once you commit and find out the real cost it may be too late to switch.

I used to use AppEngine for a few projects. For AppEngine apps you do get automatic deployment to multiple availability zones, and this is not inexpensive to implement and support. I think they charge a fair price for AppEngine.

I have not much used Google's newer VPS offerings because I got a much better deal elsewhere (BizSpark).

Goigle Compute Engine (and Amazon EC2) are dynamically scalable IaaS services with instance prices per hour of use, and aren't the same service as monthly/annual priced VPS services.

If all you need is the latter, the former is an inefficient way to get it.

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