Anyone used Google Cloud, AWS or Windows Azure platforms to host websites?

UberTiger · 14 Feb 2015 at 21:12

I just starting reading about the Google Cloud Platform and it seems pretty cool and could be quite a cost effective way of hosting small websites for quite cheap on quality hardware, instead of using a dedicated hosting company.

https://cloud.google.com/

Has anyone used it for this?

It looks like you can use Bitnami to deploy a Wordpress install.
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/

It looks like Bitnami can deploy to AWS and Azure too.
https://bitnami.com/stack/wordpress

It's a bit different from normal hosting though as you can't connect via FTP, can you? Do you have to host the install locally and deploy it when you want to update it, or how does that work?

Google are currently giving out $300 worth of free credit to be used over 2 months.

GravyMonster · 15 Feb 2015 at 14:05

I've never used Google, but I have used Azure extensively as we've move all our services over to use it - everything from websites and VMs to cloud based SQL and DocumentDB. It's definitely the best way forward for sites and services which need massive scalability.

I'd be very very surprised if there's no FTP access in Google cloud. MS certainly allow you access to your sites that way. If it's a VM then you'd need to install the FTP server yourself, but again there's no block on it.

Cromulent · 16 Feb 2015 at 12:24

Never use FTP. It is an insecure protocol and should not be used in this day and age.

Always use SFTP instead which is built into OpenSSH and is available by default on all Linux servers these days.

Out of those 3 I've only used Amazon AWS but if I wanted a Windows server I would go with Windows Azure for obvious reasons.

You might find Vultr or Linode offers better pricing than any of the above mentioned providers though. Vultr in particular allows you to install any OS you like simply by uploading an ISO install image and then installing it yourself which means you get much more flexibility with them and their specs are very good for the price.

BaJ · 16 Feb 2015 at 15:14

I've used the Azure platform a fair bit recently, mainly just Azure Web Sites, but also some VM's too.

I'm mainly an open source guy, Azure lacks a bit in terms of MySQL support, they've ClearDB as a partner but my experience of them has been pretty poor.

http://worldsgreatestazuredemo.com/

melvis · 16 Feb 2015 at 20:52

a company i was at ran close to 200 web sites purely on AWS, all linux boxes with php and a mixture of mysql and postgres, ive never used azure, but the RDS database system for amazon is amazing, the ability to snapshot and easily scale in read replicas just makes things so much more simple, shame where i am now is a VMware house, i miss some of the nice features of aws every day