Whenever I say this WordPress blog is hosted in the cloud, people automagically assume I’m using Amazon AWS. Wrong!
I’m using Google Compute Engine and let me show you why.
| Google Compute Engine | Amazon AWS | |
|---|---|---|
| Region | europe-west1-d | eu-west-1b |
| Machine Type | n1-standard-1 | m3.medium |
| CPU | 1 | 1 |
| RAM (GB) | 3.75 | 3.75 |
| Hourly Cost | $0.055* | $0.073* |
Setup:
These were the plugins I installed, activated and configured in both instances.
- Akismet: 3.1.5
- Bulk Images to Posts: 3.3
- BulkPress: 0.3.4
- Google XML Sitemaps: 4.0.8
- PHP/MySQL CPU performance statistics: 1.1.9
- Pods – Custom Content Types and Fields: 2.5.5
- Regenerate Thumbnails: 2.2.4
- SendGrid: 1.6.7
- Simple Tags: 2.4
- SysInfo: 1.1.0
- Wp Favs: 1.0.6
- WP Super Cache: 1.4.6
Both deployments (just for the test purposes) are Bitnami WordPress. Well, let’s see the interesting part, shall we?
Results:
Google vs Amazon - Results
| Test | Google Cloud Engine | Amazon AWS |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound Speed | 444.77 Mbps | 256.16 Mbps |
| Outbound Speed | 11.24 Mbps | 8.83 Mbps |
| Total MySQL Time | 7.71 s | 16.63 s |
| Total PHP Time | 1.87 s | 4.93 s |
| Total Test Time | 9.58 s | 21.56 s |
I didn’t expect to see such a difference. Google Compute Engine is twice as fast the same type of machine from Amazon AWS. And it costs way less (in fact I haven’t applied the sustained use discount for a whole month usage so you might spend way less than $0.055 with Google Compute Engine).