Free WordPress Hosting On Google Cloud Platform! After 1 year, it costs a few cents a month!

hi guys i hope you're doing well thank you for clicking on this video my name is david and welcome to utepia today we're going to use the google cloud platform to host our very own wordpress website and pay only pennies a month for it keep in mind that the solution is for a small website with light traffic as your website begins to gain popularity and grows you're going to have to pay a little bit more we're going to discuss how to leverage the free tier offered by google cloud platform to keep our costs as low as possible the first step is to go to the google cloud platform website and create a project if you have a google account already such as your gmail then you're all set however you do need a credit card linked to the account in order to get access to some of the features that we're going to be using today the second step is to deploy wordpress on the virtual machine instance on google cloud platform the third step is to give the virtual machine a static ip address so that we can link a domain name to the wordpress website the fourth step is to create an ssl certificate for our website and configure it to auto renew as a bonus we will set up a free cloudflare cdn which is short for content delivery network to enhance the performance of our website and we're going to install a nice wordpress theme to make our website look really good i know that sounds like a lot of steps and it is but they're relatively all straightforward and i'll walk you through each step of the way so what are we waiting for let's get started step one let's set up our google cloud platform let's go ahead and go to cloud.google.com once we're on here go ahead and click on sign in and log in with your gmail account after signing in you're going to end up at the google cloud home page go ahead and click on console on the upper right hand corner this is our google cloud platform i'm going to agree to the term of service and continue up here you can see that we have offered to get 300 credit to explore google cloud products although it's probably going to cost us less than a dollar to run our web page for the first year it doesn't hurt to get the credit and explore all the google cloud platform has to offer so let's go ahead and activate the offer let's select our country and agree to the term of service step two is to set up your payment profile here we select our account type whether it's business or individual enter our name and address as well as our credit card information and that signs us up for the 300 credit to spend on google cloud platform over the next 12 months all right we are in on top here you see we are in my first project but let's go ahead and start a new project so that we can be a little bit more organized and make sure we're all on the same page i'm going to call this project epic light source you can name it whatever you want all right moving on to step two now we deploy wordpress on our google cloud platform so now we have our project epic light source let's go ahead and get wordpress up and running let's go to our navigation menu that's on the upper left hand corner select marketplace and we're gonna go ahead and scroll down here to the part where it says blog and cms and we're gonna select wordpress certified by bitnami now there are different deployments of wordpress not just the wine by bitnami but in my experience bitnami's version is straightforward and easy to install it also comes pre-loaded with plenty of packages that are essential to typical wordpress themes so let's go ahead and click on launch on compute engine i'm going to keep the default deployment name but you can name it whatever you like for zone i'm going to use us west one now this is very important because there is a free tier offered by google cloud platform but it's very specific in which region you deploy your virtual machine on so to take advantage of the google cloud platform free tier we're allowed to run one f1 micro vm instance per month as long as it's in one of the volume three regions us west one u.s central one or u.s east one i recommend you pick the region that's closest to the majority of your traffic which will give your audience the lowest latency i'm gonna go with u.s west one you'll notice that u.s west one has three different zones it doesn't matter which one you select so i'm just going to use us west one b and for the machine type make sure you select the f1 micro virtual machine because that's the only one that's on the free tier for boot this type you can choose between a standard persistent disc or a solid-state drive i prefer the solid-state drive although it costs a tiny little bit more the difference is well worth it and it gives your viewers a better experience while they're browsing your website the default 10 gigabyte boot this is the perfect size for my website we'll leave these as defaults for network subnet and external ip address for firewall make sure you keep both options to allow http traffic and allow https traffic this allows internet traffic to reach your virtual machine which essentially is your wordpress website let's accept the terms of service and deploy so the deployment process has begun and right now a whole bunch of scripts are being ran a new virtual machine instance is being created wordpress is getting installed scripts are being ran to configure security firewall networks all that and all we need to do is sit back relax and wait for it to complete and it is done we have a new wordpress website here is the ip address for this externally visible website you can actually enter this ip address on the internet and it will take you to our wordpress website our admin login is user and our admin password is this right here i'm going to copy this admin password to our clipboard let's go ahead and log into our wordpress website we're going to click on log into the admin panel simply type in the username which is user and our password which will paste from the clipboard and here we are this is our very own wordpress website hosted on google cloud platform virtual machine let's go ahead and make a post we already have our hello world post but let's make a new one welcome to epiclightsource.com let us be your source for epic lighting let's go ahead and publish it it is published and let's go ahead and take a look at it and there it is that's our wordpress website with our post we just created if you notice there's two things here that we need to work on next the first thing is the ip address i happen to own epiclightsource.com so it would be great if i can just type in epic livesource.com to get to this website instead of having to type in an ip address so we're going to take care of that and if you notice it's not secured which means the web browser doesn't see an ssl certificate for this website which is why it's displaying the http version of this website instead of the https version of this website s is for the secured version so let's go ahead and take care of both of these issues in the next step step number three we need to create a static ip address for our website and we need to set a domain name to point to the website so we're going to link this ip address to epiclightsource.com but one thing to note is that this ip address although it's public it is not static which means if i restart this virtual machine instance it's going to get a different ip address so we need to make it a static ip address to make a static ip address let's go to our navigation menu on the upper left hand corner and scroll down to vpc network and select external ip addresses so here's our external ip address so let's make this one a static ipi address and to do that we're going to change the type to static we're going to give it a name let's call it epic light source and we'll click reserve and that's it we have a static ip address that will never change let's link epiclightsource.com to this website i own epiclightsource.com and if i type in epiclifesource.com right now it takes me to my youtube channel i want to change it so that it points to my new wordpress website to do this let's go to the navigation menu on the upper left hand corner and we're going to scroll down to network services and select cloud dns this enables the dns api once it's enabled you need to create a zone for zone type we want a public zone type so that it is visible to the internet for zone name i'm just going to use epic light source for the dns name i'm going to use epiclightsource.com for dns security we're just going to leave it off for now and let's go ahead and click create perfect so now we have dns records we're going to add two more so let's click on add record set for the first one we're not going to type in anything for the dns name except what's already there for the resource record type we're going to use a which is already pre-selected for ip address enter in that static ip address that we've created earlier and then click create let's add another record set for this one on the dns name we're going to use www for the resource record type let's select cname for the chronicle name i'm going to type in epic lightsource.com and then click create perfect now we have all the dns records we need we're going to use the ns records to link the domain name to our website now we can use these ns records and go over to our domain name provider and then tell them we want to link epic lightsource.com to these ns records so whether your domain name provider is godaddy or namezillo or in my case google domains let's go to our domain name provider now since my domain name provider is google domains i'm going to go to domains.google.com remember your domain name provider may be different but the steps will be the same once you're at your domain name provider's website log in and make sure you're configuring the settings for the domain that you want to use in my case we're working with epiclightsource.com right now i have a forwarding feature that sends traffic to my youtube channel which i'm gonna disable now because i want the traffic to point to my wordpress website instead to do that let's configure the dns settings so now we can use our custom name servers and we have four as you can see here and notice that the four are only different by this number one two three and four so i'll just copy one of them because i know what the other three will be and make sure you don't get this period at the end because we don't need the period let's go ahead and go over to our domain name provider and enter in our four name servers here's one we'll click add here's two add another one here's three add one more and here's four and let's go ahead and click save so it tells us that we have dns security enabled darn it i should have disabled dns security before it's too bad it was enabled and unfortunately it may take up to two days to complete well bummer we'll have to see if this works right away or not but we'll go ahead and click save so now our name servers are updated and i don't think it's gonna work but we'll try anyway let's try epic lightsource.com oh wow it actually works it takes us to our wordpress website yay all right mission accomplished let's move on to the next step step number four we're going to create an ssl certificate for our website and set it up for auto renew now the last thing we want to address is this part here it's not secure basically the reason why it's not secure is because we don't have an ssl certificate for this website so let's go ahead and create an ssl certificate so that our website is secure and visitors to our website won't get discouraged when they see that the connection to the site is not secure so let's go ahead and go back to our google cloud platform we're going to click on the navigation menu again and we'll go to our compute engine vm instance and we're gonna ssh into our virtual machine the vm instance so let's go ahead and click right here and this connects us to our virtual machine all right so we are ssh into our virtual machine let's go ahead and type a command that will generate ssl certificates so this is the command to generate the certificate it's also in the description of this video so you can copy and paste it as well hit enter so we definitely want epiclastsource.com to be added as the common name let's go ahead and type y enter and then of course we're gonna accept their term of service so we're gonna hit y and enter perfect it says congratulations the generation and configuration of your ssl certificate finished properly you can now configure crime job to renew it every month do we want to proceed yes we do because the certificate will expire and we want it to automatically be new so it's always there so now that the certificate has been configured the next step is to configure a redirect to the bitnami conf file so that all the traffic is redirected to our https which is the secure version of the website this command will open the bitnami com file so that we can edit the file allowing the traffic to be redirected to the https version of the website so we're going to go to this part of the document and type in a few lines of codes these snippets of codes is in the description of this video so you can go ahead and copy and paste it next we're going to hit control x to get out of here and as you can see in the bottom it asks us do we want to save we definitely want to save so we're going to hit y and then we're going to write to the same file that we edited so we're going to hit enter and that's it it's saved and our very last step is we're going to restart our apache server to make sure that all the changes we created is in effect so the command for that is sudo for slash op for slash bitnami for slash ttl script dot sh restart apache and that's it we are done let's go ahead and exit out of there by typing exit and enter and let's see if that made the difference so if we go back to our website here notice that it says not secure let's refresh this page and let's see if it changes and look at that we have a padlock success it is now secured we now have a fully functioning wordpress website deployed on google cloud platform it is secured with an ssl certificate and it can be accessed via a domain name we have accomplished all of our goals let's see what else we can do step number five bonus increase performance using a cdn a content delivery network let's see how our website is performing a good website benchmark is gt metrics.com and we can have it analyze epic lightsource.com so it's analyzing our website right now it's loading it up and it's seeing how fast everything is served back to the user and it's generating a report for me so here are the results they're not too bad but we can definitely improve on the leveraged browsing cache notice we have a b score of 83. on the y slow we have two failing grades add expired headers and use a content delivery network cdn well we're going to fix both of these f grades into a grades and let's start right away let's do this by setting up a cloudflare cdn to do that let's go ahead and go to cloudflare.com cdn and we can sign up it's free for one website so let's go ahead and sign up for epic light source at gmail.com and let's give it a password and let's create an account our website epic lightsource.com let's go ahead and add the site so it looks like the site is added i can see up here epic lightsource.com let's click on it right here and there is some plans we just want the global cdn here we don't need any of these other features so let's go ahead and select the free plan confirm our plan and it's good for one free website confirm and we're just gonna take a look at some of this and everything here looks good we're gonna go ahead and click continue and they tell us we need to make some changes uh on our domain name provider so what it was here we're gonna change it to this and this one we're gonna change to this and we're just gonna remove these two so let's go ahead and do that we'll we'll copy this we'll go to our domain name provider and remember we go back to our dns settings here which is actually the screen that we're already on let's go ahead and edit it and we'll change the first one to what we have on the clipboard and then we'll change the second one to what we have on our clipboard now and then we're going to just simply delete these two and click save and there we have it that's been changed so again we had four before the first two changed to these two and then these two we just simply removed and we'll go ahead and click continue because we've done that basically they're telling us it may take up to 24 hours for the change to process and the next step is we want to enable crypto protection for ssl certificates so let's go ahead and select the option for full strict and that's basically because we already have a ssl certificate on our website we also want to see if we can improve our caching performance on our website let's go over to caching let's change the browser cache expiration to something a little bit longer than four hours that's just because i don't plan to update this website very often so we'll set it to about a month and i think that'll be good all right so that's all we need to do let's go back to our gt metrics and let's see if we can retest this and see if our matrix has changed i'm really concerned about these f grades here and this one could be improved a little bit let's see what it looks like let's go ahead and rerun the test please note i waited about 20 minutes after setting up the cloudflare cdn to make sure that the cdn changes are effective wow look at that the results are so much better our page speed scores are all a's except one b our y slow score we get no more failing grades we now have an a on add expires header and an a on used content delivery network awesome results step number six this is a bonus we're going to remove the bitnami banner ad if you look carefully on the bottom right hand corner there is the bitnami banner ad and although it's not too big and obstructive it does annoy me a little bit so i prefer just to remove it the good news is it's easy to remove let's go ahead and remove it right now to remove the banner we go back to our google cloud platform open up our menu go to our computing engine and go to the vm instance there just click on the ssh that'll open up your ssh terminal here's the command to remove the banner ad it's also in the description of this video so you can copy and paste it to make the change effective right away we need to restart the apache server so the command for that is sudo forward slash op forward slash bitnami forward slash ttl script.sh restart apache hit enter it restarts and that's all there is to it let's go ahead and exit out the ssh window by typing exit hitting enter let's go to our wordpress blog refresh and what do you know there's no more bitnami logo yay step number seven this is a bonus we're going to install a wordpress theme to make it look pretty and we're gonna install the really simple ssl plugin for wordpress let's finish up our wordpress site by making it look really good simply by loading a nice theme with nice colors images fancy fonts and some tasteful designs installing a wordpress theme is relatively straightforward and easy so i won't bore you with the details we're going to skip through all that if you want step-by-step instructions just google it there are tons of resources out there every theme installation is a little bit different the theme that amazon today is called aspire pro this is not a free theme i purchased this theme many years ago and use it on a lot of my websites including eutectia.com it's powerful easy to work with and looks really clean so the website is looking great but the one thing i did notice is that we lost the padlock right here we're back to an insecure website this isn't because we don't have the ssl certificate anymore we still do the problem is that this wordpress theme uses images that are referencing a source that is not https and we can check that if we go to inspect and we search for http so like this image right here this image is http and if we were to access the https version of it that would fix the problem here's the http version you see how it's not secure but if you go to the https version of the image it's the same image but it's secure there's a great wordpress plugin called really simple ssl that will change all the image reference from http to https and fix this problem for us let's look for https so we're going to install and activate the really simple ssl plugin so this plugin is trying to update this wp config php file and it's not writable let's fix that so let's fix this right now we can go back to our google cloud platform go to our computer engine vm instance ssh into our vm here's the command to change the write access to the wp-config file the command is also in the description of this video so you can just copy and paste it as well let's go ahead and exit out here there we go now we can enable it perfect so let's see if our website is now https and look at that it is fully https and let's log out and let's go to our website as an anonymous visitor from the internet and look at that oh yes we are done it looks so good colors text animation pictures it looks great it looks fantastic and we can access it using our epic lightsource.com domain name it is fully secured and it's running off google cloud platform done well that's it i hope this tutorial was helpful let me know if you have any questions and i'll do my best to answer them oh yes and if you're not already subscribed to utep via please consider doing so your support is always always appreciated thank you so much for watching and i'll see you guys next time hey hello are you still there oh there you are i see you thanks for sticking around well if you want to see more videos check out these and um yeah these are pretty interesting videos i hope you like them and thanks again for watching i totally appreciate it you guys are awesome well i'm gonna head out now so i'll see you later bye

Channel: UTECHPIA

Views: 463,030

Keywords: UTECHPIA, Free Webhosting, Free Wordpress Website, Hosting Wordpress on Google Cloud Platform, Hosting Website on GCP, Free Hosting on GCP, Free Hosting Forever, Setup Wordpress on Google Cloud Platform, google cloud, web hosting, ssl certificate, ssl wordpress, google cloud ssl, google cloud tutorial, one page zen, wordpress https, wordpress google cloud, free web hosting ssl, free wordpress website tutorial, free web hosting, best free web hosting, GCP Free Tier

Id: cG9kv5-5bPI

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2019