I agree with most of the thigns you have said. More or less one would say the same about most of the major Clouds. Anoter company that is going there is AWS. They have started offering 1 year Free service, which requires their clients to sign up witha credit card, which means to say that they free service is just a marketing trick to get people to sign up and then start upselling them and charging for any so-called “value-added services” on a service framework which is created to be used with those “value-added services”.
I have seen that you’ve said that AWS “handles billing issues in a much more humane way” and I cannot question that. However, Ihave seen many people who have been overcharged on AWS.
It is normal that the Google billing asked you to fill in a form and upload a picture of the credit card and a government issued photo ID, if their system for any reason defined your order as a one of high risk. Whoever is the cardholder, the servie provider must have a proof that one either has purchased oneself or authorized someone else to do it. this serves as protection against fraud.
My conclusion is that one would better go with any middlesized or smaller Cloud service provider rather than with one of the major Clouds.
