Google recently provide the free tier on their Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The free tier will be free forever (but what Google offered are subjected to changes).

Also included in the free tier is $300 credit for 12 months (I think this was 2 months – good !)

I applied, created Google Compute Engine (GCE) f1-micro instance, ran the same benchmarks as I did on Vultr, DO, and Scaleway.

The best results I got from the instance:

dd write bs=4k count=10k  100k  1M
                    1500  39.6  37.5 MB/s

dd read bs=4k 
63.1 MB/s

sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=10000 run
11.7567 sec.

stress-ng --cpu 1 --cpu-method all -t 30 
156.75 ops/sec

BUT …

The results were not consistent.  I ran the dd write 5 more times, the results varied from 211 MB/s to 1.5 GB/s. sysbench results varied from 11 to 13 sec. stress-ng varied between 50 – 150 ops/sec.

I think this is because almost all the resources for free tier (CPU, disk, network) are shared among others.

It’s free, though.

Vultr has recently upgrade all instances . While $5/month has been upgraded from 1 CPU / 768 MB / 15 GB  to 1 CPU / 1 GB / 25 GB, Vultr also introduced the new smallest server instance – 1 CPU / 512 MB / 20 GB at $2.5/month.

So, I have choices:  keep paying $5/month and get an upgraded instance for free, or migrate to the $2.5/month to cut cost in half.

I chose the latter.

Unfortunately, Vultr does not allow to downgrade the instance (because disks can only be enlarged). So, I needed to migrate the server. I created a snapshot from the existing 15 GB disk, and deployed an $2.5/month instance from the snapshot. It took me about 10 minutes to create the snapshot (free), and few more minutes to deploy new instance. Then, I updated DNS record.

Things went well. So, finally, I destroyed the $5/month instance.

The result ?  You are seeing it right now. This web is running on single $2.5/month instance :D