Google Compute Engine
Shares rank 19 of 21 VPS hosts by recommenders
Recommended for reliability, engineering quality and cheap short trials, especially for infrastructure needs; critics call it a pain to use and report instances that cannot be forced off.
Recommended for reliability, engineering quality and cheap short trials, especially for infrastructure needs; critics call it a pain to use and report instances that cannot be forced off.
14 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 57%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Hard to use, especially the API
“Possibly the worst offender is the Compute Engine API”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “AEPs: API Enhancement Proposals” “GCE in particular is a HUGE pain”
Comment from 14 May 2026 in “AEPs: API Enhancement Proposals”
Other VPS hosts people recommend
The four most recommended other VPS hosts, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | 415 | 212 | 66% | 13 | 5 yrs40 owners | — |
| DigitalOcean | 133 | 117 | 53% | 12 | 10 yrs15 owners | — |
| exe.dev | 115 | 56 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Hetzner Cloud | 99 | 28 | 78% | 12 | 3 yrs8 owners | Approved |
| Google Compute EngineThis page | 8 | 6 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
All 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“AWS, Azure, GCE, Alibaba Cloud - all the same crap, different names and slightly different jenga towers.”
“Tell that to AWS Lambda and Google Compute Engine?”
“Cloud network will be a lot more stable than home.”
“The literal fucking second we have real infrastructure requirements for compute, it's right to GCE.”
“GCE in particular is a HUGE pain”
“Possibly the worst offender is the Compute Engine API”
“because it's basically used as a spam farm for years now”
“the ui shows an updated 'cost' as you start building your machine”
“Security and reliability were taken extremely seriously, and the quality of the engineering was world-class.”
“there was literally no way to force it to turn off or hard-reboot so that your block storage instances get released”
“3 years reserved 16 ARM cores + 120 GB costs + 1TB local SSD costs > $1k/month.”
“AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally”
“We put in a lot of effort with great customers to get nested virtualization running well on GCE years ago”
“To try things out with a bunch of EC2s or GCEs is cheap.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.