so in previous video I have shown you how to host a website on Google Cloud
virtual machine instance but since Google Cloud has free tier available for
everyone in this video I'm going to show you if we can really host the website
for free when trying to set up and staying on the free tier ready let's
check it out
Google cloud provides the smallest virtual machine instance f1 micro for
everyone to use for free let's look at the technical specification it's a share
core CPU so you only get a 2/10 of a single CPU core and only 600 megabytes
of RAM this seems very low but actually with good setup it's more than enough
for a small blog and static website it also has bursting capabilities which let
VM use extra CPU power for a short period I found that it allows around
200% performance of the CPU utilization for about a minute so if you happen to
have a sudden spike in web traffic this should take care of that I have another
website with around 20,000 visitors per month using f1 micro and it works just
fine with a good setup it uses around five to ten percent average CPU and only
200 to 250 megabytes of RAM as for storage free tier allows up to 30
gigabytes hard disk per month but please be careful about this if you set your
disk size to exactly 30 gigs then you will be charged I'm not quite sure about
reason but I guess it's a glitch in the billing system set it to 20 or 25 should
works fine and give you a plenty room of space for static WordPress website
although recommend you to install the minimal version of Ubuntu which require
less space the next thing you need is the external static IP address in the
past this used to be free if your virtual machine is in used for the
entire month but now Google starts charging it for one to two dollars per
month luckily free tier allows one external IP address per month so we
don't have to worry about this just keep the VM running 24/7 and don't turn it
off or you'll be charged next one that going to be the most
challenging is traffic free tier only allows one gigabyte of network egress
from the instance so if your average web page size is around 2 megabytes then
you can only support around 500 visitors per month which is very minimal anyway
you can increase this number by using CDN and to cache your websites like
CloudFlare for me using CloudFlare cut the traffic load into 1/3 of the
original and for WordPress website you can also use compression plug-in to
further reduce the bandwidth still free tier doesn't include traffic to
Australia and China so you will be charged if visitors are from these
countries bummer as for a backup solution free tier allows
up to 5GB of disk snapshot storage which is typically enough for a
single snapshot unless your website has lots of assets like videos and images
so after hosting my website using setup above for several months
here is my bill the first one on the list is the external IP address charge
around 1.5 dollars which is offset by free tier under spinning based discount
below then the remaining costs are all network traffic which is around 30 cents
very cheap considering this website has around 20,000 visitors month and
personally if your website has that much of visitors already it's time to get out
offer free tier, monetize your website and start paying for the service anyway
I still have free credit from Google so it will get offset under promotion category
so to sum up you can actually host a website on Google cloud for free but
only for a small and static website with around few thousand visitors per month
still this is great opportunity for someone who wants to try hosting website
on Google Cloud before making final decision
the f1-micro instance may be small but more than enough for a small to medium blog
or static website and if you don't mind paying for the traffic charge I used to
have around 60,000 visitors per month with f1-micro instance before I decided
to upgrade but note that you will also need to set up CDN and use cache plug-in
to reach that number and it's all for this video hope you guys enjoy if you
want to see more web dev tips and tutorials subscribe this
channel to stay tuned thanks for watching
see you next time bye