Wordpress is no doubt one of the most successful CMS platforms for hosting a website and comprehensive portals. Similarly, Google Cloud Compute Engine is picking up as a leading IaaS – Infrastructure As A Service platform.

If you have a WordPress website or planning to build a WordPress based website, it comes naturally to you to consider hosting on Google Cloud Computing Engine as one of the options. This article provides requisite information on hosting a WordPress based website on Google Cloud Platform.

One of the main reasons you are considering Google Cloud Platform for hosting your WordPress website is you may be expecting the site to grow or you have ad-hoc peaks in traffic.

Another reason you may be considering is the cost of hosting the website. Generally, if you host WordPress on Google Cloud, it may cost anywhere between 10$ to 25$ per month depending on your website traffic, etc. Google also has a lifetime free-tier option.

There are 4 resources you need to consider while hosting your WordPress website on Google Cloud Platform.

• Compute Engine
• Network Bandwidth
• Persistent Disk
• Cloud DNS

The first three options Compute Engine, Network Bandwidth, and Persistent Disk need to be considered for most of the website and Cloud DNS needs to be considered if you are hosting a high traffic website.

Choose your Virtual Machine or Customise

Google Compute Engine is the Google Cloud Platform’s Infrastructure component that offers both standard and custom virtual machines for usage. Once you open a Google Cloud Platform account you can create a new project and go to the Compute Engine area to know about the available standard Virtual Servers.

The first step in hosting WordPress is to identify suitable standard virtual machines from the Google Cloud Compute Engine options or create your own custom virtual machine.
You can know more about Google Cloud Compute Engine here – https://cloud.google.com/compute.

The standard virtual machines from Compute Engine are categorized in such a way that you can choose your own variety or you can customize one. If you are a beginner to Google Cloud and your WordPress website is a normal website you can start the entry-level general-purpose virtual machines that come as N1 Category.

Each of these machines price is given in per hour basis but while billing it is calculated per-second basis. So you only pay to peruse.

The very entry-level N1 Category Virtual Machine comes with the following configuration

• n1-standard-1 Machine Type
• 1 Virtual CPU
• 3.75 GB Memory
• $0.0475 USD Per Minute ( The prices are taken as on the date of writing this blog)

So typically the n1 category of machines comes with 3.75 GB of Memory for vCPU.

The n1-standard-2 machine type consists of 2 virtual CPUs and 7 GB Memory. You can see a comprehensive list of standard virtual machines available on Google Cloud Compute Engine here – https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-types.

So the first step is to identify the virtual machine suitable for your WordPress hosting.

Choose your Region/Zone of Hosting

Compute Engine resources are hosting in multiple locations across the world. These are internally categorized as Regions and Zones. When we are hosting a website for a targeted audience that is living in a particular region, it is better we host that website in that geographic location. And sometimes if you are hosting some data that has country-level restrictions that data needs to reside within that country, you need to host that on resources that are literally living in that country.

Google Cloud Compute Engine has multiple regions in Asia, Europe, and the US. And in each of these regions, they have zones that typically identify with a city or data center. So it is better you choose the region/zone of your choice.

For example, if you are in Singapore and your customers are predominantly Singapore and nearby regions, you can choose the Asia-southeast1 region and choose a, b and c zones hosted in Jurong West Singapore.
Similarly, for someone whose business is predominantly based out of Bangalore, they can choose the asia-south1 region and choose a,b, c zones hosted in Mumbai, India.

You can see all the regions and zones supported by Google Cloud here https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/.

The next cost even though very small will be network bandwidth. Most of the public cloud companies and private cloud companies have bandwidth calculation. It is the cost of the infrastructure provider’s network that serves the website/application to the visitors. The bandwidth is not a big issue if your website does not attack too many visitors. But there will be some portals that have huge traffic and they consume the network bandwidth to continuously sever the pages.
So there is a nominal fee associated with the network bandwidth.

Persistent Disk is the long term storage system where the virtual server stores the website and web application files. For WordPress most if the information is stored in the database. Like any other disk storage facility, Google Cloud Platform provides both SSD and HDD. Depending on the requirement you can choose the best size either 10GB or 20GB or 50GB persistent storage.

Cloud DNS is a scalable DNS service provided by Google Cloud. Cloud DNS helps in resolving the URL to the corresponding IP Address. And sometimes we also need a permanent IP address for our virtual server.
Google Cloud helps in reserving an external IP for the virtual server and charges only if you do not use it. As long as you use it, it is free.

While creating the Virtual Server you can choose the base operating system. So servers can be created with the base operating system like the CentOS or RedHat Linux etc.
Once the server is created, you can connect to the server through SSH or the Google Cloud connect mechanism and install/enable the prerequisites like Apache, MySQL, and PHP along with PHP extensions.
You can follow the regular WordPress installation process.

There is another easy mechanism whereby you can create one of the WordPress pre-installed configurations that is available at the Marketplace.