Just today I set up a Google Cloud Compute instance to run my web server, which I was moving from another VPS vendor I'd had a pretty bad experience with.
Every once in a while (perhaps 3 or 4 times since this morning), the Google server is going unreachable from the outside. Normally I can ping it, ssh to it from a Cox Cable address, and get web pages from it on http. When it's having the problem, I can't do any of those three: ping gets 100% packet loss, ssh hangs (and existing ssh connections drop), and http in a web browser also hangs.
To make the problem stranger, during the problem if I ssh to the VPS from google's web interface, I can log in and ping google's nameserver at 8.8.8.8, and I can also ping out to www.yahoo.com. So it's only incoming traffic that's having trouble, not outgoing traffic.
It's acting a little like there's an IP address conflict, but only for the external IP, not for the internal IP. But I'm having a hard time convincing myself that could be the problem.
I've only changed the firewall in one way: I added one firewall rule to allow in http.
The external IP is 34.94.223.166
Can someone please let me know how I can make things more reliable?
During the last event, the system was down for about an hour.
Looking at /var/log/syslog* from during the last event, there is nothing interesting - though the messages don't stop ether.