Can you get a super fast server free from Google? Yes, you can. Google Cloud Platform has free tier for US region server. If you are building a small WordPress website using light bandwidth, the free tier is more than sufficient. Free tier provide 720 hours of instance usage which will cover whole month of usage. The only downside is if your site use a lot of bandwidth you will be billed after 1GB of free egress bandwidth, but still cheap because 1 GB cost only $0.01 for US and 1 TB $0.12 - $0.23 depends on the regions. Most new sites use only small amount of bandwidth. Ingress is free if you wonder. As of today, the free tier offer:
- 1 f1-micro instance per month (US regions only - Excluding Northern Virginia)
- 30 GB-months HDD, 5 GB-months snapshot
- 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations per month (excluding China and Australia)
1. update your billing info.
Open https://console.cloud.google.com/billing, update your billing info. You may be requested to create a project name.
2. create your virtual server (instance)
Open https://console.cloud.google.com/compute and click CREATE INSTANCE.
3. configure your server.
Match the free tier configuration, do not click create yet after this step.
- Zone: pick a US region. eg: us-west1-a
- Machine type: micro (1 shared vCPU, 0.6 GB memory, f1-micro)
- Boot disk: 30 GB standard persistent disk. SSD is not free!
- OS images: pick one of your favor, or use Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) as what we picked.
- Firewall: check Allow HTTP traffic and Allow HTTPS traffic
4. get an static IP for your instance.
Expand Management, disks, networking, SSH keys under Networking >> Network interfaces >> External IP, select Create IP address
After you reserve an static external IP address, you can click Create to finish the instance setup.
You have complete the step 1 and you have your free server from GCP, continue to part 2 when you ready.
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