Where to reduce the number of instances?
Candide Kemmler
I was billed $361 for my last month's usage of the Google Cloud Platform where I am merely hosting two small Java apps. On Heroku, the same service would have cost me $14, that's 25x less.
The most suspicious item in my billing statement is: 3721.215 Core Hours
But where does that come from? Nowhere can I find anything that looks suspicious to the number of resources allocated.
Please, what should I look into? Where do I start?
Thank you in advance,
Candide
PS: I did use their chat support, but could only obtain my request to be "further analyzed" by their technical team. Two days later, the only answer I receive is:
"you made some changes last Nov. 26 2018, which resulted for your project to create VMs"
No indication as to what I did wrong and, of course, no information as to how to fix the situation.
This is by far the worst service I've ever had from a hosting company.
I'm not shy admitting that I'm a novice with GCP, but this is simply too high a price to pay for figuring out their terrible User Interface.
Nicolas (Google Cloud Platform Support)
Hi Candide,
Thank you for reaching out to us, I understand that you have concerns about the charges on your last invoice.
It seems that your first attempt at contacting the dedicated Billing team wasn’t really successful however I would recommend you to request direct support via Email as they will have the visibility required for an in-depth analysis and recommendations.
In the meantime if you suspect that the usage of your resources could be amplified by a technical issue, please open a bug using this link, providing a link to this Groups thread for context along with your project number so we can have a private channel to investigate your issue, we will be able to inspect it and take action if needed.
From your message I noticed that you have been charged for 3721.215 Core Hours. I would recommend that you take a look at this article where it is stated how Core Hours are calculated :
“When you are billed for instance hours, you will not see any instance classes in your billing line items. Instead, you will see the appropriate multiple of instance hours. For example, if you use an F4 instance for one hour, you do not see "F4" listed, but you see billing for four instance hours at the F1 rate.”
It’s recommended to set up a spending limit so you can keep the costs under control while becoming more familiar with billing on Cloud Platform . Also there are several ways to make your usage of the Cloud Platform more cost efficient.
I understand that you had a bad experience with the Cloud Platform but I hope that the resources provided today will be useful to you.