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by p0ppe 3912 days ago
> Use of the Cloud Shell is free through the end of 2015: you will not be charged for any resource utilization.

Would be nice if they could have stated how much it's going to cost later on. We're less than three months from 2016.

3 comments

Well, it's a micro instance. At most it'll cost what a micro instance costs.
0.005 p/h ~ $3.60 per month for those who were wondering.
That's the rate though. For little sessions here and there during your working hours and per-minute billing, I feel like it'll be unusual to do more than say 5 hours a week even if you often forget to exit before the "garbage collector" turns it off for you. That gets you into below $1/month territory pretty easily.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine but not Cloud Shell.

So $1.20 more per month than more powerful VPS from competitors like OVH.
I understand worrying about burn rate and all that, but when the entire service costs the same as a single cup of coffee per month, it might just not matter. How well it works, what features it provides, and how well it interfaces with the rest of the cloud services you're using are much, much more important concerns than saving a buck a month.
Well, not always. As a student, you don’t want to spend 4$ for a cloud console, plus 4$ for cloud IRC, plus 20$ for a VPS, plus 12$ for your phone contract, plus 120$ for a new phone every 2 years...

I – like most people – don’t let useless devices run on standby either, costing me upwards of 30$ a year for a TV on standby.

As a student, I don’t buy totally overpriced coffee that costs that much either.

You're well past the point of diminishing returns where it makes sense for you to focus your efforts more on increasing income rather than reducing expenditures further. If saving $1 per month is significant to you then it sounds like you've already cut your expenditures to the bone, and there's no more blood to squeeze from that stone. Even working a single hour per week at a part-time job would have better returns than extreme penny-pinching on unplugging appliances and rewriting entire applications to save a few bucks per month. I'm a frugal person, but not illogically so, and I know that income has no ceiling but expenditures definitely have a floor.
A sure sign of a weak argument is including the phrase "... like most people ..."

Do you really think most people unplug their televisions after using them?

Your TV uses 25 watts on standby?
I normally am quite reserved about language use, but comparing google to OVH? Seriously? OVH is a dysfunctional company that somehow turns a profit.

We almost lost our company's domain name twice due to their incompetence.

Why is OVH dysfunctional? My dedicated server is running splendid for 2y now.
Their customer service is notoriously... "hit or miss."
For non-critical things, they provide relatively good value for money. For critical things, I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole.
Please, make your contribution worth something by explaining your issues with OVH.

I've been a very happy customer for years now.

We paid OVH for the renewal of our company's domain name several weeks before its expiration. This domain hosted our google apps for business and more. We received an invoice and bank statements for that. OVH never renewed with the registry.

We only got to know about this because of a standard email warning from the country's registry (not OVH as a registrar) itself about quarantaine and expiry!

We spent over eight hours over several days talking to OVH. I have been able to verify that the problem was on the side of OVH only, and not on the registry's side at all.

In the end, we made a direct payment to the registry to make sure the domain was not deleted.

Twice? Well....
Which is why we moved away from them of course...
There seems to be 5GB of associated storage ... would be interested to know if they are charging for that or if it's part of your wider Google allocation or if there's an ongoing cost once you generate data in there that will keep charging forever, even if you use the service only intermittently?
They likely don't know how this is going to be used, so they want to gather usage statistics (both user and resource) to determine what it should cost.
Another question is how much bandwidth do you get for free? Could I run a torrent tracker on it or SSH tunnel video streams?