Web giant Google has announced that its infrastructure-as-a-service offering, Google Compute Engine (GCE), will soon be hosted on European data centres.

GCE was first announced at the company’s developer conference, Google IO, in June this year. It offers hosted, Linux-based virtual machines on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Pricing starts at $0.151 per hour for a single-core, Europe-hosted virtual machine with 3.75GB of memory and 450GB local storage, and goes up to $1.208 per hour for an eight-core VM with 30GB of memory and 1770GB storage.

Yesterday, Google also announced the availability of new high memory and high CPU instances, and introduced a new ‘Durable Reduced Availability’ cloud storage service, which offers reduced availability for lower prices.

Google suggests three use case for its GCE services: batch processing; ‘big data’ analytics and high performance computing.

Few IaaS offerings have yet to give market pioneer Amazon Web Services a run for its money.

"By market share, Amazon is a de facto monopoly," wrote Gartner analyst Lydia Leong in August, "although this market doesn’t have the characteristics of monopoly markets; the sheer number of competing vendors and the early stage of the market suggest shake-ups to come."

Leong added that there were two possible routes for other suppliers to make a headway in the IaaS market: "You have a giant sales channel with a ton of feet on the street and existing relationships, or you have excellent online marketing and instant online sign-ups."

It is hard to imagine a company with better online marketing that Google.