Google Cloud Hosting, and or Compute Engine, is just one of many services provided by Google Cloud Platform. They also offer their App Engine, storage, DNS, CDN, and a multitude of other services and products. Google Cloud Platform consists of a set of physical servers, as well as virtual resources like virtual machines (VMs) that are contained in Google’s data centers around the globe.
Google Cloud Hosting Advantages
1. Better Pricing Than Competitors
Both AWS and GCP have a dizzying array of instance sizes to choose from, and doing an apples-to-apples comparison between them can be quite challenging. These predefined instance sizes are based upon number of virtual cores, amount of virtual memory and amount of virtual disk.
This makes it perfect for startups and for enterprise IT to cut costs. AWS, for example, requires prepays in the form of “reserved instances” to be eligible for the discounts. And Azure only offers a 5% discount on a 12-month prepay.
2. Private Global Fiber Network
Hybrid connectivity: Cloud Interconnect, Cloud VPN, Carrier Peering, and Direct Peering provide connectivity solutions for Google Cloud. Cloud Interconnect delivers an enterprise-grade connection to Virtual Private Cloud.
Cloud Load Balancing: Worldwide auto scaling and load balancing. Quickly scale applications on Compute Engine with Cloud Load Balancing—no pre-warming needed. Distribute load-balanced compute resources in single or multiple regions and near your users while meeting high-availability requirements.
3. Live Migration of Virtual Machines
Benefits of live migrations allow for the engineers at Google to better address issues such as patching, repairing, and updating the software and hardware, without the need for you to worry about machine reboots. Neither AWS, Azure, or smaller providers like Digital Ocean offer this functionality. Another huge advantage for Google Cloud Hosting, especially for how we use it here at Kinsta is live migrations of Virtual Machines. As a WordPress hosting provider, this means we are basically always up with our VMs, with no noticeable degradation in performance when they are live migrating VMs between host machines.
4. Improved Performance
Kevin at Review Signal threw a whopping 10,000 concurrent users against our servers and as he noted for the Load Storm test, Kinsta had basically flawless performance with flat average response times, minimal errors and no spikes.
We were the first managed WordPress host to exclusively utilize Google Cloud and are the only enterprise-level host using them. And we would like to think that the results speak for themselves. Kinsta was just recently named top tier once again in Review Signal’s annual 2018 WordPress hosting performance benchmarks. And a lot of this is thanks to Google Cloud Platform.
5. State of the Art Security
Another big advantage is security. Choosing Google Cloud Platform means you get the benefit of a security model that has been built upon over the course of 15 years, and currently secures products and services like Gmail, Search, etc. Google currently employs more than 500 full-time security professionals.
Kinsta maintains security precautions in line with industry best practices. While we use Google Cloud Platform, it doesn’t mean we have obtained the same security certifications. We are also not HIPAA compliant at this time. You can see more in-depth behind the scenes in Google’s security whitepaper.
6. Dedication to Continued Expansion
Google has continued to rapidly build out their infrastructure for Google Cloud Platform. On September 29th, 2016 they announced the locations of new strategically placed Google Cloud Regions. We are very excited to see São Paulo and Sydney included in the list as this will help dramatically decrease latency for Google Cloud Hosting customers across South America and Australia.
7. Redundant Backups
It stores data redundantly, with automatic checksums to ensure data integrity. The beauty of multi-regional storage is that it is also geo-redundant, which means cloud storage stores your data redundantly in at least two regions within the multi-regional location of the bucket. As it pertains to Google Cloud hosting, this ensures you will never lose your data, even in the case of a disaster.