[4k]

I might be missing something important here. But according to their pricing page[1], a preemtible VM with 30GB memory costs $86.4 a month.

Why would someone go for this when cheap dedicated host providers like hetzner etc offer powerful dedicated servers with 64GB memory and multicore server grade CPUs? The comparison only gets worse taking into account that Google's offering is preemptible and can shutdown and come up as they wish.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/#pricing (0.12x24x30)

[rwmj]

It's like asking why do people use Serviced Offices which are usually 10x the price of a monthly rented office. Answers: because they only need the office / VM for a few hours. Because they can immediately get an office / VM of any size they need. Because they can walk away from the office / VM when they don't need it any longer. It's certainly not for everyone, but Regus seem to be doing ok.

[vidarh]

And for those who truly only need it now and again, it's great.

But time and time again I see infrastructure where people pay for these services for large amount of instances that are running continuously, blindly assuming that it's cheap because it's cloud. There's a bizarre level of price-blindness amongst certain subset of customers of Google Cloud and AWS that I've never seen anywhere else.

[CydeWeys]

It's about scaling. Google's offering is a cloud service and Hetzner's is not. You're always paying the same amount per month with Hetzner, whereas you'd only pay that much with Google if you have consistent full utilization (which seems rather unlikely; most workloads do not look like this). Secondly, if you create something that becomes popular, you can scale it up on GCE a lot more easily than you can with a dedicated hosting provider.

[noelwelsh]

APIs, instant access, massive scale, no setup fees, and value-added services like DBs and message queues are all reasons to use a cloud provider.

[PeterisP]

If I want to run a processing job that takes a 1000 core-hours and have the results today, I can do that on their VMs for a couple dollars per run. Being able to do that on owned hardware or dedicated hosts would be orders of magnitude more expensive.

Similarly, if you're running hosted app that on most hours doesn't overload a single server, on peak hour fills three hosts, but on a large advertising event or accidental viral link takes fifty hosts for a day, and then goes back to normal - then you don't want to run it on VMs where you have to pay for them by month.

[vidarh]

That's true, but those are extreme niche use cases, and in most cases people have a substantial base load that they can run on dedicated servers for anything from 1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of AWS/Azure/Google (even with reserved instances and factoring out retainers for someone to handle ops issues).

Nothing stops you from mixing and matching dedicated servers with handling batch jobs and peaks with cloud servers. In fact, most data centre providers can offer the full range from unfurnished colo space to cloud offerings out of the same data centre these days - either directly or via partners hosted in their buildings. At least that's my experience.

[jedberg]

Using the cloud as a rented datacenter is never a good idea. It will certainly cost you more.

If you're going to use the cloud you have to do it right, and that means auto-scaling and variable resource usage. Then this option will save you money.

[lnanek2]

Google's cloud pricing is really terrible. Other competitors are intentionally driving prices down to dominate the market, so Google's prices kind of come across as a joke.