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Google just recently (at Google I/O 2012) announced their new cloud product, the Google Compute Engine. I don't really understand what it is exactly but I heard it's basically some sort of VPS service.

So I was wondering if it would be suitable for running a Bitcoin client for a web application. I don't know what resources are required for running such, either do I know what prices you get when doing so in Amazons platform. Google says Compute Engine's pricing gives you the same computation power for half the price of competitive products, but I cannot really compare.

Did anyone made this consideration as well? Did anyone take a closer look at this?

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Comparing the GCE's pricing to Amazon EC2's pricing for the cheapest tier, it appears that Google would be cheaper should the CPU usage be small (which in case of bitcoind it should be in most cases). However, as GCE is still early in development, few people could run benchmarks on it and the prices can change abruptly (much like the prices of Google App Engine changed after the early beta period).

As it stands, Google Compute Engine looks like a viable option for cheap hosting of bitcoind.

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  • I don't know exactly how pricing works for those products, but if you now schedule your bitcoin tasks every hour, can you cut the cost in half? Or will you be billed per running hour? – Steven Roose Jun 29 '12 at 13:12
  • @StevenRoose It is probably possible to reduce the costs, but it depends how precisely you are billed. It probably would be possible to be billed in finer amounts than per whole hour. – ThePiachu Jun 29 '12 at 13:42
  • @ThePiachu: In AWS EC2 you're billed per whole hour, so you're out of luck if you do a small thing every hour. I don't know about GCE. – Meni Rosenfeld Jun 29 '12 at 15:30
  • I meant by working an hour and skipping an hour. So actually every 2 hours. – Steven Roose Jul 1 '12 at 21:55

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