I just recently moved this blog from a Web Hosting company to the Google Cloud Platform. As of this writing, this blog is hosted on a Debian 9 Linux server with the back end database on Google Cloud SQL. If you are interested in the how and why of this, keep reading.
I am paying what I think is a little too much to host this blog that sees virtually zero traffic. I put a lot of time into it 10 years ago and I don’t like the idea of it just going away. It is a sentimental thing I guess. The previous hosting is going to expire at the end of February, so now was a good time to make the move.
In my day job, I am currently learning about Google Cloud Platform where I learned I could get a Free trial with up to $300 of credit for one year. There are also items on the Cloud Platform that can allow me to host this Blog for close to, if not free unless this blog were to suddenly take off.
The server this is hosted on is a machine time of f1-micro which is at the Free Level. I just checked and I have a message in the console that says: “This instance is overutilized. Consider switching to the machine type: g1-small (1 vCPU, 1.7 GB memory)” I am not sure I want to do that, because this blog seems to be performing just fine. I will have to let it run to see what happens.
The database is hosted on Google Cloud SQL as a MySQL database. The database is running on a db-f1-micro, which is the smallest database that can be configured on Google Cloud. I did not configure backups, because the extra storage has a cost and I already have a Backup plugin that makes a backup of the WordPress installation and database to my Dropbox account. This will have a cost when the free trial is over, so I end up creating a new server with the database self contained and run it over utilized because of the use of this site.
Google Cloud allows me to host the DNS for my site for an extremely low cost. Moving the DNS over is very easy. I maintain the Domain on GoDaddy just to keep it simple. The certificate for this site is from Let’s Encrypt and using a program called CertBot to keep the certificate up to date.