I spoke about this in my previous posts about my why I built my web apps (here, here, and here), but today I want to go into more detail about why I use Google Cloud to host my web apps.
Let’s Go Back To August 2022
I’m on Twitter, like usual, and I see Heroku trending. This interests me because I use the Platform-as-a-Service to host my web apps for free.
Oh no. Oh…this is not good. There’s a blog post from the CEO about the company’s “next chapter” and users aren’t happy.
I read that the PaaS will remove their free dynos in November 2022.
That affects me because I use the free dynos.
Why is this happening?
Oh, it’s because of the following: “Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans.”
I go back to Twitter and many people on there think Salesforce wants to make money off their purchase of Heroku so the free plans got to go! Maybe. Both the fraud on the free tiers and the compay wanting to make a profit can both be true at the same time.
Well, what am I going to do? Let’s see how much the other dynos cost. Oh, they cost $7 a month. And I have to purchase a dyno for each application. I can’t host all of them on one. Well, that’s gonna be too expensive for me. Especially since they don’t make any money.
I gotta leave Heroku.
Enter The Search
I return to Twitter and look for Heroku replacements. Especially providers offering a free tier.
I try out different PaaS, but I don’t like them. Some don’t allow me to use a custom domain name with the free tier. Others are too difficult for me to use, especially since I use Python and Flask.
I give up trying to find a free tier or a free PaaS provider. I’ll spend some money because I don’t want to end up in the same position later of if the next provider ends their free tier. Plus, I’m using someone else’s servers, electricity, and staff, so it’s just right to pay for that.
Who do I want to go with now? DigitalOcean? Nah, they’re too expensive. AWS? If I think DigitalOcean is too expensive, AWS is definitely out of my budget.
What about Google Cloud? I used them before for testing out virtual machines and other small things. Hmmm. This looks promising.
Here’s Why I Use Google Cloud
The main reason why I use Google Cloud for hosting my web apps because I already have a Google account and tried the service.
Another reason was their documentation about how to deploy a Python app on their service. It was well-written and easy for me to follow.
Finally, the monthly cost is low. Really low!
The company does a great job on giving customers an estimated cost of using one or many of their services. For my web apps I use the App Engine primarily, but also their Storage function. Because my applications don’t use many resources my montly bill is about $0.03 to $0.05 per month.
Yep, you read that right. There are some months where I only pay $0.01.
The final reason I stay with Google Cloud because I’m a Google employee. I might as well use the service that I help maintain.
That reminds me: Do employees get a discount? I need to check on that.