[MichaelGG]

We switched to GCE because of two main things:

1. Speed. Everything is faster on GCE. From the not-terrible portal, to VM start times, to the machines themselves and storage.[1]

2. Price. Google was a half to a fifth of the price of Azure. Even with an Azure enterprise agreement GCE was far better.

Great job. I didn't think I'd like a Google product, and I came in very biased against Google, but you totally won me and others over thru a flatly superior product.

1: Azure still has an embarrassingly bad SSD story. Even when talking to them they don't seem to realize what a useless offering they have. I guess their plan is to focus on software on top of Azure, cause as IaaS it's simply not competitive.

[ohitsdom]

The one thing I'm confused about with Google is what product do I select if I want a server to host a website on? Azure has the smallest VM at around $13/month, and on that I can host a website, database, services, etc. Does Google have a similar option? GCE's setup and pricing doesn't seem geared towards that.

[boulos]

Are you just looking to have a single VM running Windows Server?

We definitely have individual VMs that cost less than that (the f1-micro would be about $5/month for the VM, the g1-small about $13/month). You can hook them up to Autoscaling, Google Cloud DNS and Google Cloud Load Balancing (which Azure's "Basic tier" VMs don't seem to support; I'm not familiar with them, just reading what it says).

That said, I'm not sure I'd try to run Windows server on such a small instance (we apparently allow it and only charge $.02/hr in those cases). For example, Chrome's Clusterfuzz team runs Windows bots using the n1-standard-2 (2 vCPUs and ~8 GiB of RAM). Maybe someone can comment as to whether Nano Server would improve this situation...