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I am hosting my SaaS site using Google Cloud. All my clients are based in SA. I chose Google Cloud after experiencing very bad service from Azure. I won't go ba

I am hosting my SaaS site using Google Cloud. All my clients are based in SA. I chose Google Cloud after experiencing very bad service from Azure. I won't go back to Azure, even if they build the datacenter behind my yard. I love the pricing and simplicity of Google Cloud. Ironically, my site is on Microsoft .NET stack, but I still don't trust Microsoft with hosting my site. I hope Google and AWS will follow suite and build datacenter in SA.

simooooo 9y ago
Care to give some specifics?
- madiathomas 9y ago
  First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. Google offered me $300 credit which lasted for 5 months because the total monthly cost is $59.00. Azure was expensive compared to Google Cloud. Their pricing was also complicated and full of jargons. Microsoft offering was also not appealing. They were offering less memory and less storage space. Up to this day, I still don't understand why Google can offer services using Microsoft software cheaper than Microsoft itself. Maybe I am just not their target market.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - raesene9 9y ago
    I'd suggest that's easy, Google are running a loss-leader to get you onto their platform. In terms of market share on cloud computing platforms, Google is currently running third to AWS and Azure, so it makes sense for them to take some short term losses to help build their position. Whether they will maintain that kind of pricing in the long term, remains to be seen.
    - madiathomas 9y ago
      I doubt it is a loss leader. That's a fair price to pay for the kind of hosting I require. Local web hosting companies who are profitable charge less than what Google is charging me.
      - raesene9 9y ago
        if they provide you with $300 of free credit how can that be anything other than a loss leader? They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide...
        mschuster91 9y ago
        > They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide... At Google's scale, unless you mine bitcoins and actually use CPU/GPU time, the money Google actually spends on your tiny $300 free trial is maybe worth a dollar or two (and if they run free trials on machines that are paid off in terms of taxes, the only "expenses" are a tiny tiny sliver of maintenance - at Google scale network connectivity is basically free). Cloud providers, especially for 24/7 running services, are a total rip-off even compared to managed servers, and deploying your own bare metal will blow any cloud calculation away when you're getting serious (> 200GB RAM, 50+ cores). The real strength of cloud is when you need extremely high computing power for very short time (e.g. heavy software builds, occasional transcoding, ML training).
        raesene9 9y ago
        that's still a loss leader... And it's opportunity cost we're looking at here. It may only cost them a small amount to provide the resources (although that ignores the cost of developing/maintaining the services) but if they provide $300 of credit to one party that's resources they're not selling for $300 to someone else.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      Google has been running the most advanced cloud far longer than the others, and has the efficiency and costs to show for it, which they pass on to their customers. They're definitely being aggressive with pricing but they're still making money. Their pricing is definitely way better to deal with than AWS or Azure.
  - 300bps 9y ago
    You said, "after experiencing very bad service from Azure". Now that you give details it doesn't seem to fit what you said. Sounds like your issues were pricing (no trial, higher cost, fewer resources per $) and your confusion with Microsoft "jargon". That doesn't equal very bad service to me.
    - madiathomas 9y ago
      That's just a quarter of the story. I wasn't happy with their customer service and setup tools too. That's part of the customer experience. As for Google, I never needed to contact them. Everything just worked. Right information was provided every step of the way, which eliminated the need to contact them. The whole setup took me less than an hour and my site was up and running.
    - killjoywashere 9y ago
      Your use of quotes around jargon qualifies as "scare quotes" clearly indicating your disdain for OP's concern about Microsoft jargon. Microsoft does indeed use jargon, and it's an entirely reasonable principle of purchasing to avoid products the purchasor don't understand. Jargon is a well-known source of misunderstanding.
  - itaysk 9y ago
    You don't have to be eligible for a trial. Everyone can open a trial account with 200$ for 3 months. Additionally Azure App Services has a nice free tier which, if your needs are basic, might even let you run free forever. Disclaimer - I work for Microsoft.
    - infogulch 9y ago
      "Free Tier" is "60 CPU minutes / day" [1]. That's barely enough time to create the default project in Visual Studio and build it, let alone do some trial development off of it. [1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-servic...
      - taspeotis 9y ago
        You do the development on your computer, then deploy it to Azure. See this example: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/aspnet-4-ci-cd-azure-automatic https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/as... The CPU minutes/day come from serving your site's HTTP requests and the like.
        infogulch 9y ago
        So if you put up a site on a random domain and nobody ever touches it, it won't accumulate minutes?
        stan_rogers 9y ago
        Not without scheduled jobs (crons or the equivalent) or always-live processes, no. If you're leaning on a runtime the server owns and your own code is never invoked, you are (or your account is) not using any CPU time.
        infogulch 9y ago
        Thank you for the explanation. I learned something today. (To be fair the site is not clear.)
  - blablabla123 9y ago
    I had mostly positive experience with Azure. Sure, it's definitely not the cheapest cloud - but on the other hand it compares well with AWS. I credit Azure for focussing on simplicity and having a polite customer service. Regarding Google, I had really bad experience with that at some point. When App Engine was still young, it was mega unreliable, it seemed not even the Google people could predict when it failed. Not only that, at some point, when it wasn't so beta anymore, they changed pricing model and raised the prices unproportionally high. Eventually I painfully migrated my app onto some Virtual Private Server. > First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. I had 150 € for free a month, for half a year or so and afterwards access to a 60k € program. You can try to apply for that. Anyways, I don't want to make any advertisment. My current project is hosted on Scaleway using Docker, so I can do what I want and I don't depend on any Tech Giant's benevolence.
christogreeff 9y ago
Service from Azure support has always been superb for me. What type of trial were you looking at?
- madiathomas 9y ago
  I only needed a month trial.
  - iamacynic 9y ago
    they don't want your $59/month.
    - madiathomas 9y ago
      That's what I suspected too. Let me give it to Google who wants it. Even when the company grows and I require more power and more storage, I will still give it to Google.
      - iamacynic 9y ago
        eventually you'll find out google doesn't really want your $59/month either.
boulos 9y ago
Cool! Luckily, we have a POP in Johannesburg and it's "only" 160ms from there to London/Paris along our backbone (then another handful to europe-west1 in Belgium). Do you have good telemetry on the kind of latency your customers on seeing? Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- madiathomas 9y ago
  I haven't checked. All I know is that they are happy. I will check and report back.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
Just mentioning, i didn't knew Google Cloud does the .Net stack also. But i haven't had any bad experience with Azure ( small webapps, not huge ones). ( i chose Azure over Amazon) I just publish and run. Some web apps have been running for over 4 years, without me touching it and paying customers ( 1-10). I only had one small "downtime" moment, but it was over after 15 minutes. I wouldn't expect anything more from where i host it. The biggest annoyance i had was the redesign of the dashboard, which had me confused for a while ( it changed a lot, so that's normal), then again, i don't hate change. I switched to the new interface asap.
- madiathomas 9y ago
  It was also a surprise for me when I found out that Google Cloud does Microsoft .NET. Within minutes of setup, I was already connecting to my newly created server via remote desktop. The rest I do manually. My first choice was AWS. Their telephonic verification system failed when I was trying to signup and I wasn't allowed to finalise signup. Tried 3-5 times more and gave up. Just when I was about to rewrite my system using open source technologies, I discovered that Google Cloud does have .NET support. It was a big relief.
Vinnl 9y ago
Funny, I don't have personal experience with either, but I'm always reading that Google's customer service is abysmal (i.e. non-existent). But then, maybe you just haven't needed them yet.

simooooo 9y ago

Care to give some specifics?

madiathomas 9y ago
First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. Google offered me $300 credit which lasted for 5 months because the total monthly cost is $59.00. Azure was expensive compared to Google Cloud. Their pricing was also complicated and full of jargons. Microsoft offering was also not appealing. They were offering less memory and less storage space. Up to this day, I still don't understand why Google can offer services using Microsoft software cheaper than Microsoft itself. Maybe I am just not their target market.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- raesene9 9y ago
  I'd suggest that's easy, Google are running a loss-leader to get you onto their platform. In terms of market share on cloud computing platforms, Google is currently running third to AWS and Azure, so it makes sense for them to take some short term losses to help build their position. Whether they will maintain that kind of pricing in the long term, remains to be seen.
  - madiathomas 9y ago
    I doubt it is a loss leader. That's a fair price to pay for the kind of hosting I require. Local web hosting companies who are profitable charge less than what Google is charging me.
    - raesene9 9y ago
      if they provide you with $300 of free credit how can that be anything other than a loss leader? They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide...
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        > They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide... At Google's scale, unless you mine bitcoins and actually use CPU/GPU time, the money Google actually spends on your tiny $300 free trial is maybe worth a dollar or two (and if they run free trials on machines that are paid off in terms of taxes, the only "expenses" are a tiny tiny sliver of maintenance - at Google scale network connectivity is basically free). Cloud providers, especially for 24/7 running services, are a total rip-off even compared to managed servers, and deploying your own bare metal will blow any cloud calculation away when you're getting serious (> 200GB RAM, 50+ cores). The real strength of cloud is when you need extremely high computing power for very short time (e.g. heavy software builds, occasional transcoding, ML training).
        raesene9 9y ago
        that's still a loss leader... And it's opportunity cost we're looking at here. It may only cost them a small amount to provide the resources (although that ignores the cost of developing/maintaining the services) but if they provide $300 of credit to one party that's resources they're not selling for $300 to someone else.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Google has been running the most advanced cloud far longer than the others, and has the efficiency and costs to show for it, which they pass on to their customers. They're definitely being aggressive with pricing but they're still making money. Their pricing is definitely way better to deal with than AWS or Azure.
- 300bps 9y ago
  You said, "after experiencing very bad service from Azure". Now that you give details it doesn't seem to fit what you said. Sounds like your issues were pricing (no trial, higher cost, fewer resources per $) and your confusion with Microsoft "jargon". That doesn't equal very bad service to me.
  - madiathomas 9y ago
    That's just a quarter of the story. I wasn't happy with their customer service and setup tools too. That's part of the customer experience. As for Google, I never needed to contact them. Everything just worked. Right information was provided every step of the way, which eliminated the need to contact them. The whole setup took me less than an hour and my site was up and running.
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    Your use of quotes around jargon qualifies as "scare quotes" clearly indicating your disdain for OP's concern about Microsoft jargon. Microsoft does indeed use jargon, and it's an entirely reasonable principle of purchasing to avoid products the purchasor don't understand. Jargon is a well-known source of misunderstanding.
- itaysk 9y ago
  You don't have to be eligible for a trial. Everyone can open a trial account with 200$ for 3 months. Additionally Azure App Services has a nice free tier which, if your needs are basic, might even let you run free forever. Disclaimer - I work for Microsoft.
  - infogulch 9y ago
    "Free Tier" is "60 CPU minutes / day" [1]. That's barely enough time to create the default project in Visual Studio and build it, let alone do some trial development off of it. [1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-servic...
    - taspeotis 9y ago
      You do the development on your computer, then deploy it to Azure. See this example: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/aspnet-4-ci-cd-azure-automatic https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/as... The CPU minutes/day come from serving your site's HTTP requests and the like.
      - infogulch 9y ago
        So if you put up a site on a random domain and nobody ever touches it, it won't accumulate minutes?
        stan_rogers 9y ago
        Not without scheduled jobs (crons or the equivalent) or always-live processes, no. If you're leaning on a runtime the server owns and your own code is never invoked, you are (or your account is) not using any CPU time.
        infogulch 9y ago
        Thank you for the explanation. I learned something today. (To be fair the site is not clear.)
- blablabla123 9y ago
  I had mostly positive experience with Azure. Sure, it's definitely not the cheapest cloud - but on the other hand it compares well with AWS. I credit Azure for focussing on simplicity and having a polite customer service. Regarding Google, I had really bad experience with that at some point. When App Engine was still young, it was mega unreliable, it seemed not even the Google people could predict when it failed. Not only that, at some point, when it wasn't so beta anymore, they changed pricing model and raised the prices unproportionally high. Eventually I painfully migrated my app onto some Virtual Private Server. > First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. I had 150 € for free a month, for half a year or so and afterwards access to a 60k € program. You can try to apply for that. Anyways, I don't want to make any advertisment. My current project is hosted on Scaleway using Docker, so I can do what I want and I don't depend on any Tech Giant's benevolence.

christogreeff 9y ago

Service from Azure support has always been superb for me. What type of trial were you looking at?

madiathomas 9y ago
I only needed a month trial.
- iamacynic 9y ago
  they don't want your $59/month.
  - madiathomas 9y ago
    That's what I suspected too. Let me give it to Google who wants it. Even when the company grows and I require more power and more storage, I will still give it to Google.
    - iamacynic 9y ago
      eventually you'll find out google doesn't really want your $59/month either.

boulos 9y ago

Cool! Luckily, we have a POP in Johannesburg and it's "only" 160ms from there to London/Paris along our backbone (then another handful to europe-west1 in Belgium). Do you have good telemetry on the kind of latency your customers on seeing? Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

madiathomas 9y ago
I haven't checked. All I know is that they are happy. I will check and report back.

NicoJuicy 9y ago

Just mentioning, i didn't knew Google Cloud does the .Net stack also. But i haven't had any bad experience with Azure ( small webapps, not huge ones). ( i chose Azure over Amazon) I just publish and run. Some web apps have been running for over 4 years, without me touching it and paying customers ( 1-10). I only had one small "downtime" moment, but it was over after 15 minutes. I wouldn't expect anything more from where i host it. The biggest annoyance i had was the redesign of the dashboard, which had me confused for a while ( it changed a lot, so that's normal), then again, i don't hate change. I switched to the new interface asap.

madiathomas 9y ago
It was also a surprise for me when I found out that Google Cloud does Microsoft .NET. Within minutes of setup, I was already connecting to my newly created server via remote desktop. The rest I do manually. My first choice was AWS. Their telephonic verification system failed when I was trying to signup and I wasn't allowed to finalise signup. Tried 3-5 times more and gave up. Just when I was about to rewrite my system using open source technologies, I discovered that Google Cloud does have .NET support. It was a big relief.

Vinnl 9y ago

Funny, I don't have personal experience with either, but I'm always reading that Google's customer service is abysmal (i.e. non-existent). But then, maybe you just haven't needed them yet.