Events like these (whether Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc.) always have multiple big announcements which are worth discussing and it seems many people agree.

There are numerous benefits with using a major cloud provider so while the outbound bandwidth is expensive, surely you can see how every business has it's own needs and should weigh the costs for themselves. As a GCP startup, we're scaling very economically on their platform and wouldn't give it up even if the bandwidth was free elsewhere.

I mean ffs, I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. And fwiw, we're not cloud based for the exact reasons you mention (some spot usage). It makes sense for our business model, we have predictable computing growth needs, so we go bare metal. But I understand why that doesn't make sense for other people.

Not everyone. I've had plenty of discussions with people who had no idea.

For reasons better analyzed by anthropologists than technologists, but all I would really like is for HN to not be constantly bombarded with not-news GC marketing spam all day.

I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, but let's just compare for a moment. Vultr offers 10GbE for all price tiers, access to actual networking power tools like BGP sessions, access to 14 datacenter locations. They provide a generous amount of bandwidth by default and only charge $0.01/GB (the actual market rate) for anything after it. Unlike GC they have yet to "fat finger" a routing table causing a global network outage, or trash an important metadata server like AWS just did. CPU benchmarks routinely show them (and pretty much everybody else) trouncing at least AWS for the same cost basis, by a lot. Benchmarks have also, amazingly, shown some of the AWS instances losing out to mobile phone CPUs.

Facts, benchmarks and a cost analysis suggest that they are at worst competitive and likely far superior to GC/AWS offerings in pretty much every way at the one thing that a "cloud" provider should be especially good at: giving you solid, high performance VMs to run your infrastructure on.

I don't want to hear crap like "my investor read a marketing brochure somewhere so we went with X". If my investor told me that, I would make sure to inform him of the value of paying less money for a better thing, and how knowing the difference can be a huge competitive advantage.

I believe there's some kind of Google event happening in San Francisco at the moment.

They are giving you free computing resources.

You could enjoy using it for something that makes no sense economically but people might enjoy. Or host your open source application on it. But I guess open source would be uneconomic too.

Or you could complain.

Cloud Hosting Showdown: DO vs. Linode vs. Vultr vs. OVH vs. Scaleway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023