As part of its ongoing effort to compete with Amazon in the cloud computing game, Google has beefed up the technical support options for businesses who use its sweeping collections of cloud services.

The Google Cloud Platform now includes online services for running software applications and storing data, such as: Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, and BigQuery. These services began as a bit of an experiment, but then the company got serious, hoping to convince big businesses to run on its cloud. In in October 2011, it began offering commercial support for Google App Engine, and it soon followed suit with other services.

But buyers had only one option for paid support: a $500 "premium" account. Now the company is giving users a wider range of support options for its entire line of cloud services, starting at $150 a month.

The plans include:

Bronze: A free tier with only online documentation, support forums and billing support.

A free tier with only online documentation, support forums and billing support. Silver: All of the above plus e-mail support "for questions related to product functionality, best practices, and service errors," for $150 a month.

Gold: This $400 plans adds 24/7 phone consultation. Platinum: Google didn't post the cost of this option, which will get a customer "direct access to a Technical Account Manager team." The support plans are probably a move to make the services more competitive with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Joyent, and Microsoft Azure. It's hard to say how well the Google family of cloud products has done in the market, but research conducted by cloud management vendor Zenoss found that Google App Engine was the most popular "platform cloud" among its users.

With a platform cloud, companies and developers can build and operate applications without having to juggle the raw infrastructure running beneath them, such as individual virtual servers. This differs from an infrastructure cloud – such as Google Compute Engine – where you're given nothing but virtual servers. In some ways, an infrastructure cloud is less of a hassle, but it also gives you more freedom to do whatever you want.

Meanwhile, Google App Engine is continuing to evolve. On Thursday, Google announced that the service will now offer high-memory virtual server instances that allow customers to buy more memory without also paying for more CPU power, an updated plugin for the popular Eclipse development environment, experimental support for the Java 7 programming platform, and more.

These announcements follow the big unveiling of the company's first high-end Chromebook, the Pixel. Google pitches its browser-based Chromebook as consumers, but it also sees them as business machines.