I don't think you're being fair with your comparisons to DO when it comes to price. The f1 micro $5/month Google servers are SO much worse. Those "always free"

I don't think you're being fair with your comparisons to DO when it comes to price. The f1 micro $5/month Google servers are SO much worse. Those "always free" f1 micros have 600mb of RAM, do not have SSDs and according to some tests[0] you only get 20% of 1 vCPU. There's also some pretty severe write limitations. That's a really big difference vs DO's 1gb of RAM, SSD and 100% of 1 vCPU. The performance difference alone with SSD vs no-SSD is massive, especially on a database and while most web apps aren't CPU bound, 20% of 1 vCPU is bound to run into problems beyond a simple hello world that you set up in your example. Also what happens if your app doesn't even fit in that 600mb? On DO you could get a 600mb app + 100mb OS + 150mb DB + whatever else running on that $5/month server since it has 1gb of ram. In a real world application I wouldn't be surprised if that cluster performs way worse than a single DO server in the $5/month range. In some cases your app wouldn't even be able to run. [0]: https://www.opsdash.com/blog/google-cloud-f1-micro.html https://www.opsdash.com/blog/google-cloud-f1-micro.html