I was looking to host some websites and wondered if I could do it for free on either Google Cloud or AWS free instances. Google list their free instance as having 2 vCPUs, while AWS list only 1. However, since this is an arbitrary unit derived by the cloud service themselves, we don’t know if 2 vCPUs on Google is really faster than one on AWS
I wanted to use the service with the highest performance, so I decided to benchmark the two using sysbench. To my suprise Google was actually faster than AWS as you can see from the screenshots. Ultimately I found shared hosting to be higher performance in the real world, as you share a large powerful server with a lot of memory, so it can handle spikes in traffic better, and once I factored in backup and support costs, it made sense to just pay for that.
