Google Cloud Hosting is a big player when it comes to cloud hosting solutions on the internet. As Google, you can expect that the services they host to be good and there are lots of options available and things to consider when it comes to whether Google Cloud Hosting is the best for you.
Google Cloud Hosting, for example, has some of the best performance on the market. It has a lot of features that will help you grow your website and rank highly on Google enabling you to produce a top-performing website.
In this article, we will be looking at Google Cloud Hosting and see whether it is the right cloud host for you.
Google Cloud Hosting Overview
The first Google cloud computer service was known as App Engine. It was founded in 2008 and the platform was used for developing and hosting web applications through worldwide data centers. Now Google Cloud Hosting is available in 13 languages including numerous European, English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
The services of Google are highly regarded by some of the big players across the world. As you would imagine, Google’s own YouTube service uses the infrastructure and there are 24 hours of video uploaded to that platform every minute. In addition, there are one billion hours of TV watched via YouTube every single day. This includes all the small-time producers as well as major films that can be rented and streamed on YouTube.
In addition to their own services, Google Cloud Hosting is used by Coca-Cola, Twitter, PayPal and eBay. So these are sites that get a lot of traffic in their own right and therefore, you can see the kind of infrastructure that is available for you.
Why use Google Cloud Hosting?
Google Cloud Hosting has the infrastructure to take you across the world. It has been used by educational and government sectors for a long time because it is reliable and you can create simple websites and more on the platform. Google is heavily influenced on Linux, and even has its own variant of Linux. So, if you’re used to working within that environment, then this might be the best option.
Google Cloud Platform also offers excellent performance for your website. When compared to some of the competitors, you’re going to find that your website will do well against the typical benchmarks that are used to rank a website’s performance. This includes page loading time, time to first byte and more.
The uptime for Google is also really good. Like most cloud hosting platforms, you’re probably not even going to notice if your website has any downtime, nor are any customers.
In addition, you’re going to be comfortable with the billing process for Google Cloud Hosting. You get billed based on the usage of the infrastructure on a sophisticated minute-level increments. They define a month as 720 minutes. It can be really hard to work out, but at the basic level of pricing with Google, you will be billed $6092 per year (or $508 per month).
But with that, you will get excellent networking standards. You can create virtual private networks with ease and you can have public and private subnets that you can help arrange your virtual machines from. You can also add firewalls, gateways and routers that can help you create the network that you need for your website.
While working on Google Cloud doesn’t require an IT degree or lots of experience. It would really help.
What are the Negatives of Using Google Cloud Platform?
While Google has numerous advantages and you can be sure that your website and any network that you want to develop is going to be safe and secure on the platform, there are some areas where the hosting service is lacking.
The first major disadvantage is the technical skills required for the platform. As we touched on before, you don’t need an IT degree or website development experience to use Google Cloud Platform, but it would be a serious advantage and make your projects much better. To be honest, it should only be used directly by those with experience and knowledge. You need a lot of patience as well to work on Google Cloud Platform directly.
However, if you’re used to Kinsta or Cloudways, you could benefit from the infrastructure and cost of Google Cloud Platform with much less technical problems. If you’re looking for a WordPress website, then you can use Kinsta. Any other web application and you’ll probably want to use Cloudways.
Another problem is the number of data centers there are across the world. Google has several including numerous centres in the US, Europe and Asia. There is only one in Australia, one in South America and there are none in Africa or the Middle East. There isn’t a significant number of data centers in Russia either.
So, in most areas, you can choose a data center that is closest to your audience, but there are big gaps within the potential reach. For instance, for those that sell to customers in South Africa, the closest data center is in Brazil or India. This is a significant distance that might affect performance. The slower your website, the more revenue you’re going to lose.
In addition, there are limited options when it comes to software and packages when compared to other hosting services like Kinsta, Cloudways or Amazon Web Services. Therefore, you might want to go with one of these options instead.
Finally, the cost can be high. Not many small businesses can afford $6000 a year on their website without considering development costs, maintenance costs and additional software to run the website.
Final Word: Is Google Cloud Platform a Good Choice?
For those with technical experience that want to run a Linux system, then you’ll be hard-pressed to find an option that isn’t more suitable. While pricing is complex, Google is a good option because it has some of the best performance available. However, there are limited package options and you will need technical expertise to make the most out of Google.
If you’re certain that Google Cloud Platform is the right platform for your new web application, it is highly recommended that you use Kinsta for WordPress and Cloudways for other applications. These can hook into the Google Cloud Platform giving you access to the benefits but can also offset some of the negative issues that you might experience otherwise.
