Google Compute Engine vs WebFaction: What are the differences?
What is Google Compute Engine? Run large-scale workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure. Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.
What is WebFaction? Hosting for developers: full shell access to fast servers with all your favorite tools pre-installed and maintained for you. No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.
Google Compute Engine and WebFaction can be primarily classified as "Cloud Hosting" tools.
Some of the features offered by Google Compute Engine are:
- High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.
- Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.
- (Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.
On the other hand, WebFaction provides the following key features:
- 100GB diskspace, RAID-10 setup
- 512MB application RAM
- Free RAM for web and database servers
"Backed by google" is the top reason why over 86 developers like Google Compute Engine, while over 2 developers mention "Cost effective" as the leading cause for choosing WebFaction.