Now let’s take a look at some of the top advantages to using Google Cloud Hosting and why we think it is currently the best solution on the market as it pertains to pricing, performance, stability, scalability, backups, and security.

• Better Pricing Than Competitors
• Private Global Fiber Network
• Live Migration of Virtual Machines
• Improved Performance
• State of the Art Security
• Dedication to Continued Expansion
• Redundant Backups

1. Better Pricing Than Competitors

Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you only pay for the compute time you use. And a big bonus is that they give you discounted prices for long-running workloads with no up-front commitment required. Use the VMs for a month and you get a discount, as simple as that. 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 + Tiered Network

Alex said it best in an article about Google Cloud Platform on Techcrunch, “The Power is in the Network.” One thing that sets Google Cloud Hosting apart from some of the other players is that their network is one of the biggest in the world. Will Shulman, co-founder of MongoLab, talked about the network in a panel at Google I/O saying: “It is blazing fast. The other thing – it has a private distributed backbone between all the data centers. You are talking over Google’s backbone, not over the Internet.”

 Google Cloud Platform network

3. Live Migration of Virtual Machines

Another huge advantage for Google Cloud Hosting, especially for how we use it here at Kinsta is live migrations of Virtual Machines. Neither AWS, Azure, or smaller providers like Digital Ocean offer this functionality. So this is a very important differentiator for Google Cloud compared to other cloud providers. 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.

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. Miche Baker-Harvey, Tech Lead/Manager at Google put together a great illustration of the high-level steps involved in a live VM migration.

 Live VM migration on Google Cloud

And besides live migration of virtual machines, Google also offers resizing of persistent disks without any downtime. You can use the portal or CLI to actually resize the live disk.

4. Improved Performance

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. 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.  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.

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. Niels Provos, a security Engineer at Google, gave a great in-depth look at the security of Google Cloud Platform (see video below).

Some of Google Cloud Platform security features include:

• All data is encrypted in transit between Google, the customers, and data centers; as well as the data in all of the Cloud Platform services. The data stored on persistent disks is encrypted under 256-bit AES and each encryption key is also encrypted with a set of regularly changed master keys.
• The layers of the Google application and storage stack require that requests coming from other components are authenticated and authorized.
• Because Google has relationships with some of the biggest ISPs in the world, this helps improve the security of your data in transit as it means fewer hops across the public internet.

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

Google Cloud Storage is designed for 99.999999999% durability and has 4 different types of storage: Coldline storage, nearline, regional storage, and multi-regional storage. 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.