# Google Cloud

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/google-cloud/

Google's public cloud (Google Cloud Platform): Compute Engine virtual machines, Kubernetes, serverless containers, managed databases, storage and analytics in regions worldwide.

## Who it suits

A VM that can start free and grow on per-second billing: the Free Tier includes one e2-micro a month in three US regions with 30 GB-months of standard disk, paid compute starts at $0.008376428 an hour for an e2-micro in Iowa, and Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud SQL and BigQuery sit on the same bill across 43 regions.

Consider something else if You move a lot of data out or want a fixed monthly price: Premium Tier egress is $0.12 per GiB to North America after the first GiB (Standard Tier gives 200 GiB free, then $0.085), there are no monthly plans, and the free e2-micro runs only in us-west1, us-central1 and us-east1.

## iScore

62 / 100 (80% interval 55–69), rank 3 of 17 in hosting — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every hosting peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/google-cloud/alternatives/

- Price: 54 (38–70), weight 29%, 5 of 5 criteria scored
- Capacity and limits: 52 (40–65), weight 29%, 2 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backup_retention, entry_plan_memory, entry_plan_storage, file_count_limit
- Capabilities: 81 (74–88), weight 10%, 5 of 11 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: connection_pooling, edge_network, git_deploy, persistent_processes, scale_to_zero, scheduled_jobs
- Trust and compliance: 77 (68–87), weight 14%, 0 of 13 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: customer_managed_keys, dedicated_infrastructure, encryption_at_rest, gdpr_data_residency, hipaa_eligible, iso27001, pci_dss, private_networking, rbac, soc2, support_included, support_response_time, uptime_sla
- Evidence: 86 (86–86), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 51 (9–94), weight 10%, 0 of 2 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes — Free Tier monthly usage limits with no end date; separate from the $300, 90-day Free Trial credit. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features), read 2026-10-17)
- Kind of free offer: Always free ([source](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features), read 2026-10-17)
- What the free plan includes: Compute Engine Free Tier: one non-preemptible e2-micro VM a month in us-west1 (Oregon), us-central1 (Iowa) or us-east1 (South Carolina), 30 GB-months of standard persistent disk, and 1 GB a month of outbound data transfer from North America to all region destinations except China and Australia. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features), read 2026-10-17)
- Credit card to start: Yes — Asked at the Free Trial signup, which gives a new account the billing account the Free Tier requires. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features), read 2026-10-17)
- When the free offer ends: Never for the Free Tier, though Google may change or remove its limits with 30 days' notice. The separate Free Trial is $300 of credit for 90 days; an account not upgraded to a Paid billing account by then is closed and its resources stopped. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features), read 2026-10-17)
- Entry paid plan: No plan fee; compute is pay-as-you-go. The smallest predefined machine type, e2-micro (2 shared-core vCPUs, 1 GiB), is $0.008376428 an hour on demand in Iowa (us-central1), the region the price list shows first; committed-use discounts lower it. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/products/compute/pricing/general-purpose), read 2026-10-17)
- Pricing model: Usage-based and billed per second: vCPUs, GPUs and memory are charged a minimum of 1 minute, then in 1-second increments. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/compute/vm-instance-pricing), read 2026-10-17)
- Egress over allowance: $0.12 per GiB for Premium Tier (the default) internet data transfer out to North America from 1 GiB to 1,024 GiB a month, $0.11 to 10,240 GiB and $0.08 beyond, as listed for Iowa (us-central1), the region the price list shows first. Standard Tier is $0.085 per GiB from 200 GiB to 10,240 GiB. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing), read 2026-10-17)

### Limits

- Included bandwidth: 1 GiB a month of internet data transfer out to North America on Premium Tier, the default tier, which prices that first GiB at $0.00. Standard Tier, which has to be chosen explicitly, includes the first 200 GiB a month free per account across all regions. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing), read 2026-10-17)

### Deployment

- Docker deployment: Supported ([source](https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/overview/what-is-cloud-run), read 2026-10-17)
- Containers: Supported ([source](https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/overview/what-is-cloud-run), read 2026-10-17)

### Infrastructure

- Persistent storage: Supported ([source](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/persistent-disks), read 2026-10-17)
- Managed databases: Supported ([source](https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/introduction), read 2026-10-17)
- Autoscaling: Supported — Managed instance groups, by load. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/autoscaler), read 2026-10-17)
- Regions: 43 regions and 130 zones, per Google Cloud's locations page on 2026-10-17. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/about/locations), read 2026-10-17)
- Uptime SLA: 99.99% for instances in multiple zones; 99.9% for a single instance of most machine families (99.95% for memory-optimized); Stockholm and Standard Tier differ. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla), read 2026-10-17)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: Basic Support for every customer, including Free Trial accounts: documentation, community forums, billing assistance and Active Assist. Standard, Enhanced and Premium Support are separate tiers. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/support), read 2026-10-17)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: Covered by Google Cloud's core SOC 2 Type II reports, issued quarterly for Google Cloud and Google Workspace products generally. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/soc-2), read 2026-10-17)
- ISO 27001: The Google Cloud Services ISMS holds an accredited ISO/IEC 27001 certification, audited by an independent third party. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/iso-27001), read 2026-10-17)
- PCI DSS: Compute Engine is listed among the Google Cloud services an independent Qualified Security Assessor found PCI DSS 4.0.1 compliant. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/pci-dss), read 2026-10-17)
- Encryption at rest: Google encrypts all customer content stored at rest by default, with no action needed from the customer. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/docs/security/encryption/default-encryption), read 2026-10-17)
- Customer-managed keys: Cloud KMS customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) give the customer ownership and control of the keys protecting data at rest in Google Cloud services that integrate with them, created manually or through Cloud KMS Autokey. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/kms/docs/cmek), read 2026-10-17)
- Role-based access control: Identity and Access Management (IAM): fine-grained authorization that grants a principal a role, a collection of permissions, on a Google Cloud resource; every action is checked against it. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/overview), read 2026-10-17)
- Private networking / VPC: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks: a virtual version of a physical network, implemented inside Google's production network, that connects Compute Engine VMs. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/vpc), read 2026-10-17)
- Dedicated infrastructure: Sole-tenant nodes: physical Compute Engine servers dedicated to hosting only one project's VMs. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/nodes/sole-tenant-nodes), read 2026-10-17)