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Google Cloud Computing Instance, What's the Catch ?
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Google Cloud Computing Instance, What's the Catch ?

I saw someone posted about Free Google Cloud Computing. From what I saw, it was pretty good deal. They are giving a free VPS.

There must be something right ? What's in it for them ? and Can I use it as my production vps ? is there anything I should know about it before I am using it on production ?

Comments

  • jgillichjgillich Member
    edited June 2017

    https://cloud.google.com/free/

    There is no catch (I know of). But you must be a business if you're in the EU: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-questions

  • So, basically every google account can get free 512MB VPS FOR FREE FOR LIFETIME. That's pretty good deal for me.

  • @yokowasis said:
    There must be something right? What's in it for them?

    >

    Stealing customers from AWS/Azure and getting people onto their platform.

    It's not a secret AWS and Azure are the big players in the cloud realm. Google would love to get more people onto their platforms, so free stuff. :)

  • DerekDerek Member

    Its there to get you to build your application around Google's cloud platform. Its a win win for everyone till you find yourself paying $1k+ and hard to move anywhere else while your app grows.

    Thanked by 1flatland_spider
  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    The catch is that it is Google, so at some point, without much warning or communication it will be scrapped or the terms will change, that might be next month that might be in 6 years time.

    Thanked by 1flatland_spider
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    yokowasis said: There must be something right ? What's in it for them ? and Can I use it as my production vps ?

    Did you read the FAQ? "Because this is a period to test and explore Google Cloud Platform, you should not run production applications on Cloud Platform during the free trial."

    yokowasis said: is there anything I should know about it before I am using it on production ?

    You might want to be sure you understand how bandwidth is billed...

  • Goodluck with "computing" their terms and pricing structures

    Thanked by 1BlaZe
  • DamianDamian Member

    AnthonySmith said: The catch is that it is Google, so at some point, without much warning or communication it will be scrapped or the terms will change, that might be next month that might be in 6 years time.

    ....and up to this point, they will have absolutely no support for it. If you ask for any help, you'll likely receive a single reply a day from a guy in a different country who doesn't understand English and will happily copy/paste replies for a problem you're not having.

    Seriously, for as much as Google has their hands in everyone's digital lives, the support they provide is useless.

  • yokowasisyokowasis Member
    edited June 2017

    We are let. We pay low price in exchange of no support. Usually the support we need is regarding "slow vps, slow connection" and other problem. It's not like we create a ticket to ask how to install GUI in our VPS. We ask that kind of thing on LET. I have 1 vps on ARUBA. I never even once create a ticket. Their VPS just works, that's all that matter.

    @Damian said:

    AnthonySmith said: The catch is that it is Google, so at some point, without much warning or communication it will be scrapped or the terms will change, that might be next month that might be in 6 years time.

    ....and up to this point, they will have absolutely no support for it. If you ask for any help, you'll likely receive a single reply a day from a guy in a different country who doesn't understand English and will happily copy/paste replies for a problem you're not having.

    Seriously, for as much as Google has their hands in everyone's digital lives, the support they provide is useless.

    We have 1 year period. It's such a waste, to not using it to the fullest. Besides, google give us 512MB free for life VPS. That's not limited by time period. I think it's okay to use it on production server, if the problem is only the time limit.

    @raindog308 said:

    yokowasis said: There must be something right ? What's in it for them ? and Can I use it as my production vps ?

    Did you read the FAQ? "Because this is a period to test and explore Google Cloud Platform, you should not run production applications on Cloud Platform during the free trial."

    yokowasis said: is there anything I should know about it before I am using it on production ?

    You might want to be sure you understand how bandwidth is billed...

    I mean, I literally spend years to find a good free shared hosting in the past. And until this day, I have found none. Usually they impose ridiculous limit which is makes sense. Now google offer free vps for life. It's awesome in my opinion. Much better than free shared hosting.

  • AidanAidan Member
    edited June 2017

    Network ingress is rather expensive on Google's Cloud Platform, just keep that in mind when doing your calculations.

    https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran

    yokowasis said: google give us 512MB free for life VPS. That's not limited by time period. I think it's okay to use it on production server, if the problem is only the time limit.

    The problem is "only" that you get 1GB of outgoing traffic per month (not 1TB!!! really, just 1GB), and for any overage you pay at $120/TB.

    Thanked by 1Aidan
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    yokowasis said: Now google offer free vps for life. It's awesome in my opinion. Much better than free shared hosting.

    I suspect you don't understand

    • there's no bandwidth with this plan

    • every gigabyte of bandwidth is going to cost you 12 cents a GB or more, possibly up to 23 cents a GB

    100GB a month and you're paying $12 monthly for that "free" 512MB VPS.

    You can burn some of the free credit for the first year, but after that, it's impossible not to get a bill every month unless your VPS sits idling with zero network usage.

    yokowasis said: I mean, I literally spend years to find a good free shared hosting in the past. And until this day, I have found none.

    That's because there is none.

    Let's see, 1 Aruba VPS and "years" seeking good free hosting. You're quite a catch as a customer :-)

    Thanked by 1rm_
  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    yokowasis said: Usually the support we need is regarding "slow vps, slow connection" and other problem.

    You wont even get that.

    yokowasis said: I think it's okay to use it on production server

    I really don't understand why, you get 1GB of traffic and it is not intended for production use.

    Oh well, in a world where price is king and free is godlike people just expect way to much sometimes.

  • @rm_ said:

    yokowasis said: google give us 512MB free for life VPS. That's not limited by time period. I think it's okay to use it on production server, if the problem is only the time limit.

    The problem is "only" that you get 1GB of outgoing traffic per month (not 1TB!!! really, just 1GB), and for any overage you pay at $120/TB.

    Re-read that page please, it states 1GB per day, not per month.

  • Which page ? I just reread the always free quota it states 1gb/month bandwidth egress. And free ingress bandwidth

  • yokowasisyokowasis Member
    edited June 2017

    I think 1gb is enough for serving small websites. Just use free cdn like cloudflare and jetpack. It will save bandwidth. It's free after all. You don't get something free without breaking a sweat.

    Edit: free plan even come with free ipv4.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    I think we got your point. All your dreams have come true now. Anything else?

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran

    teamacc said: Re-read that page please, it states 1GB per day, not per month.

    Stop being this retarded please, Google App Engine is some unrelated shared-hosting like shit, for the VPS offer you need to look at the Compute Engine:

  • @raindog308 said:

    I think we got your point. All your dreams have come true now. Anything else?

    Nah I am good. I guess the only limitation is the lack of bandwidth. Just need to find a way to load off that bandwidth elsewhere.

  • @rm_ said:

    teamacc said: Re-read that page please, it states 1GB per day, not per month.

    Stop being this retarded please, Google App Engine is some unrelated shared-hosting like shit, for the VPS offer you need to look at the Compute Engine:

    Crap.

    In my defence, google doesn't make it easy to wade through the amount of different products and pricing per item, depending on x y and z.

  • Their pricing scheme is much more confusing than multi level pyramid Ponzi scheme. No wonder they create a calculator

  • PwnerPwner Member

    In before OP comes back one month later with "RIPPED OFF BY GOOGLE FREE VPS >:("

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    "Now if I get 1GB bandwidth a month for free, then I can resell 10 shared hosting packages with a 100MB quota and that's before overselling...and the server is FREE..."

    image

    Thanked by 3Pwner saf31 H2YTech
  • PwnerPwner Member

    @raindog308 said:
    "Now if I get 1GB bandwidth a month for free, then I can resell 10 shared hosting packages with a 100MB quota and that's before overselling...and the server is FREE..."

    He's already talking about offloading the bandwidth using Cloudflare to save on outgoing bandwidth. He's playing 6-dimensional chess while everyone else is busy playing tic-tac-toe.

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • OP:

    Thanked by 1saf31
  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep
    edited June 2017

    Damian said: ....and up to this point, they will have absolutely no support for it. If you ask for any help, you'll likely receive a single reply a day from a guy in a different country who doesn't understand English and will happily copy/paste replies for a problem you're not having.

    Seriously, for as much as Google has their hands in everyone's digital lives, the support they provide is useless.

    What sort of support are you talking about? For understanding how to use the problem, their documentation is 100x more complete than any low end provider (e.g. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/how-to). Of course, they have so many features that it can be difficult to find what you're looking for if you want to set up something complex and uncommon, but there's always Stack Overflow. If you really can't figure out how to do something on their platform you can always purchased paid support plan (starts from $150/mo), which from what I read is actually pretty decent, far from useless; even the free "Bronze" support I hear is better than what you get from most low end providers, I'm not sure where you got the idea that it is outsourced to people who don't know anything about the platform.

    From what I know, their support for platform issues (e.g. VM is down) is amazing (i.e. 99% of the time they'll know about the issue and have it reported on https://status.cloud.google.com/ before you notice).

    yokowasis said: Their pricing scheme is much more confusing than multi level pyramid Ponzi scheme. No wonder they create a calculator

    They have many different products. If you go and look up the pricing for bandwidth on the wrong product then you're not going to get the information that you were looking for. https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing literally has the all of the pricing information for Compute Engine on one webpage, I think it's pretty clear that they've spent time trying to make their pricing as simple as possible for an IaaS platform. For example, instead of going the path of AWS with reserved instances, they have sustained use discounts that IMO are easier to understand and definitely easier to use (just keep regular VM online through the month and enjoy the discount, no need to purchase in advance).

    BTW, keep in mind that network ingress is free.

    Thanked by 1yomero
  • Would be pretty sweet getting ddos'd on this and getting a huge bill

  • Next New Service From Google: Free Grave. It's free and for life. You just need to kill yourself to use it but did I mention it's FREE?

    Thanked by 1bugrakoc
  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep
    edited June 2017

    JoeMerit said: Would be pretty sweet getting ddos'd on this and getting a huge bill

    I think you can set a daily budget to avoid unexpected costs (https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6293540?hl=en).

    Edit: hmm you might have to add your own script to handle the alert.

    Edit2: actually it doesn't matter too much since incoming traffic isn't billed; so you would just need to control outgoing packet rate from the VM.

  • @serverian said:
    Next New Service From Google: Free Grave. It's free and for life. You just need to kill yourself to use it but did I mention it's FREE?

    There are a lot of people die everyday you know, Google will be bankrupt if they are gonna do that.

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