Free WordPress hosting in GCP

If you are on borderline of experimenting blogging or writing or creating your own website and don’t want to spend lot of money, here’s a way to try your hands on it with free wordpress hosting in GCP (Google cloud platform).

For wordpress, Most of articles you will read on internet will ask you to host your wordpress on one of the paid hosting platforms or on wordpress itself. Though their cost is starting from 1-3 dollars per day, most of these cheapest plans need 2-3 years of commitment in form of payment, and adding few extra things like dns security and email, cost will easily cross 200 USD for one time payment.

First step : Buying a cheap domain

Ok, so hosting can be free but you need to spend some amount to buy a domain which will cost starting from 5 usd. If you search around for domain name of your liking, you can find one. Try lot of options, many new domains are available. Check pricing on multiple sites like godaddy, google domains, namecheap etc. For my website representing my android apps, I went with .app domain as it’s perfect and it costed me only 10 usd.

.app domain is exclusively by google domain but available for purchase on other sites also. It comes with https requirements in-built, means it will need SSL certificate for your server. We’ll see how to get one free.

Also, if you like one domain, check same domain on multiple sites and compare pricing in final cart. There are few more items along with domain names are sometimes included like DNSSEC (Hiding your personal info from whois.net when someone search that domain details. Your info will be replaced by third-party providers.) and Email hosting. The reason behind checking final pricing in cart is that some sites will include this as freebies, some will charge extra.

Once you buy your domain, in dashboard, enable DNSSEC.

Free WordPress hosting on GCP.

Initially, when you are not expecting thousands of users on your site, you can host your wordpress blog on Google cloud using GCP’s free tier. For our free wordpress hosting, free tier provided by GCP is more than enough.

Claim your free tier

There are two ways, you can claim your free hosting :

1. Free 300 USD Credit

For first time users (if you have an gmail account and have never used GCP, you can claim by registering on GCP console), GCP provides 300 USD or 21000 INR free credit for 12 months. One smallest size VM (f1-micro with approx 512 Mb RAM) will cost max 6-7 USD per month. Click here more details.
If you are not going to use any other GCP services, you can launch higher end virtual machine also till these 300 usds are over. If you don’t use, it will anyway lapse after 12 months.

2. Always Free Tier

Apart from initial free credit, Google has many cloud resources which comes under free-tier which means free forever till you respect their limits.

Free Virtual machine forever :
In this free-tier, f1-micro which has 512 mb memory is free. Only egress traffic is counted which is also free till 1 GB from North America. Only thing you need to take care is that you can launch this free VM in only in list of supported regions. Check the image for details.

Also, for launching wordpress, WordPress image is available in Google Cloud Marketplace, so you can deploy in one-click as explained here, without going through any wordpress installation and configuration yourself.

Click here to know more details about GCP’s free-tier.

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