How to Host a FREE Website on Google Cloud Platform

hey everyone this is tony teaches tech i'm tony and in this video i'm going to show you how to set up a wordpress website on the google cloud platform for free that's right free hosting free storage space and free bandwidth every single month restrictions apply i'll get into those in the video but the point here is that you can get started with the google cloud platform without spending a dime now i'll be the first to admit that the restrictions we're working with are pretty tight the server is going to have less than one gigabyte of ram about 30 gigabytes of storage space and one gigabyte of monthly transfer but as long as you stay within those restrictions your website is literally free forever so let's go ahead and take a look at how we do this i have already signed up for my google cloud platform account and i'm logged in at console.cloud.google.com up here as you can see and what we want to do is click on the navigation menu on the left and go down to the compute engine in here we want to create a virtual machine instance a vm instance so go ahead and click on create and you can call your instance whatever you want i'm going to call mine wordpress test okay now here is where some of those restrictions are going to take place as we define our server i'll put something up on the screen here that will that we can reference as we build our server so basically the region we are allowed to be in is either oregon iowa or south carolina so we have iowa selected here that is fine for now and you can pick whatever zone you want within iowa i'll stick with the default a now as far as the machine configuration we want to make sure that we're picking the n1 first generation which is an intel skylike cpu so make sure you select that and we'll go ahead and expand these details right now please ignore these pricings this is going to be we're going to get this down to zero dollars well technically around five dollars per month but that's going to be absolutely free for you now the next thing you want to change is the machine type this one we want the f1 micro instance which as i referenced earlier it is 614 megabytes of memory less than a gigabyte of ram that's okay go ahead and pick that we are down to 4.28 cents per month let's go change our uh operating system and our disk drive our disk space so we can do that in here and i'm gonna pick ubuntu you can pick any of these without um i think without any extra charge so i'm gonna pick ubuntu and the version i'm gonna select is ubuntu 20.04 lts for long term support and as you can still see on the screen here the size the max size that you can have here is 30 gigabytes so let's go ahead and take advantage of that select that to apply the changes and now up here our total is five dollars and eight cents per month but you can see here that your first 744 hours of this instance usage are free this month and so what does that mean 744 hours well if you do uh 31 days in a month times 24 hours in a day you'll see that equals 744 hours which means essentially this is 100 free you're not going to be charged anything for creating this instance now the only other thing we want to do on this page is to make sure that we allow http and https traffic but other than that we're good to go so let's go ahead and create this virtual machine and this will take i've seen anywhere from 20 seconds up to a couple minutes so instead of wasting your time i'm going to pause the video and i'll get back with you when it finishes all right guys in about 15 seconds later we're good to go our instance has been created as you can see here wordpress test within the iowa zone and it has this external ip address that's listed here now this is the point in the tutorial where if you do want to associate a domain name with this server we're going to go ahead and do that if not you can go ahead and skip through this part what i'm going to do is copy this ip address this external ip address and go to the place where i bought my domain name which is dreamhost and this will work anywhere where you get your domain name the same concept will apply all you have to really do is come into your dns settings and create an a record for your ip address so the the type is the type of the record is a and the value is going to be the ip address so we'll go ahead and add that record and there's one more record that we want to add and that's going to be for the www version of our website so www.tonyflorida.me that's the domain name that we're working with let's add that record as well and this takes some time to propagate so it's a good thing we're doing this at this point in the tutorial now we have two a records for our domain name tonyflorida.me one for just tonyflorida.me and one for www.tonyflorida.me both pointing to the ip address of our server okay now that that's out of the way let's go back over to the google cloud platform and log into our server via ssh now typically you would do this with either the gcloud command i'll have a video on that or you could use your terminal window or putty if you're using a windows computer but because we don't know the root password yet we have to do it in a web browser and it's really cool they have it set up for you where you could just click on that and this will go ahead and transfer your ssh keys to the vm which is a secure way of connecting to the virtual machine again this will take just anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to start up so i'll pause the video here and catch up with you when it finishes all right guys we're in we are logged into the remote server via ssh and as you can see here we are running ubuntu 28.04 which is the operating system that we picked when we created this virtual instance now the first thing we want to do before we go ahead and install wordpress and all the dependencies is to update our system and we can do that with sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade so go ahead and execute that command by the way all of these commands in this tutorial will be linked in the description below so you can copy and paste them instead of typing them from the screen they will be on my blog at tonyteaches.tech so check those out when this is finished i'm going to hit y to continue when this is finished i'll catch back up with you all right our system is up to date that has finished and the next thing we want to do is to install a web server we're going to be using nginx a database we're going to be using maria database which is a mysql database and php all of which are necessary for wordpress to run so let's go ahead and do that with this command here apt-get install nginx maria database server phpfpm and phpmysql so hit enter and this will take a little bit longer it's 199 megabytes of space same thing as before i will pause the video catch back up to you when it finishes okay now that we have all that software installed let's check what version we have for php and that is 7.4 we'll use this a little bit later and let's check our mysql version like i said we're using maria database and that is version 15.1 now let's work on our database okay first let's secure a database within mysql secure installation command and this is asking us for our current root password we don't have one but we do want to set one so type y and go ahead and type a password and confirm that password and pretty much for the rest of this we will type in y to accept the defaults and this again is securing our mysql database installation now that we have that all set up we can go ahead and log into our mysql server with sudo mic sql dash u for user root p for password type in the password that you just created and now we are we have a my sequel console and what we want to do is to create a database for our wordpress website again all of these commands will be available on my website which is linked below first thing i want to do is to create a database called example underscore db and then we want to create a user with a password with create user his name is going to be example username and he is going to you have a password that is example underscore password in reality you're going to want to make these uh more secure and suiting to your needs as far as the names and the passwords are concerned anyway let's grant all privileges on the database to this user as long as he's on this local host so execute that and then finally we want to flush the privileges which is essentially applying our changes and then we can exit out of our mysql command prompt now let's go into the var www directory and in here is the default place for websites all the website files are usually living under here as you can see there's an html directory we're going to go ahead and make our wordpress website in a directory under here called wordpress so let's go to the official wordpress website we're going to use the wget command to download the latest version of wordpress as in archive so execute that command here and once we have that we can go ahead and extract its code right now it's just going to be a tar file which is basically like a zip file we can extract that with pseudo tar zx vf the name of the archive and then finally we want to remove that tar file because we don't need it anymore so we can do that with rm latest.tar.gz so now we have that wordpress directory we want to change the owner of this wordpress directory to the www data user in the www data group that's what this syntax does right here we're going to do that recursively for everything inside of the wordpress directory so go ahead and execute that now that's all we need to do for wordpress so far let's just take a peek inside of here we have all of these php files and other configuration files that are necessary for wordpress to run default out of the box so let's go ahead and move on and work on our web server again that we're going to be using nginx so we can go into the etc nginx directory and in here we have a few directories and configuration files but we're going to be working out of the sites available directory and in here we have our default configuration file we're going to actually make a new configuration file i'm going to call mayan tonyflorida.me.com and it's just usually the name of your domain name followed by dot conf and i'm going to be using the vim text editor if you don't know how to use that i'll have a video about how to use that or you can use a different text editor to edit this file so what i'm going to do is copy in the configuration file content and paste that in and this is a little overwhelming for a lot of people but let's just go through it real quick we're going to be listening on port 80 which is the default http port we have our server name which is my domain name and the www version of the domain name which you saw earlier we already set up those dnsa records to point to this ip address so that's all linked up our wordpress website exists at this directory on our file system and our index of our website the first the home page uh file is called index.php now the only other thing i want to point out here is that we are using php version 7.4 like we checked earlier so that's why we have this referenced up here okay so let's go ahead and save that file and in order for those changes to be visible we have to sim link from the sites available directory our configuration file that we just created to the site's enabled directory and we can do that with the ln s command so that looks good and finally let's restart our nginx web server with system ctl restart nginx and we didn't get any output no errors or anything like that so i think we're good to go let's go ahead and get out of this console window for now open up a new tab and go to tony florida dot me and this is great this is the installation for wordpress it's reading our system are i it's basically has gone to the ip address looked to the dns lookup and is now serving the files from the var www wordpress directory so let's go ahead and go through this installation we can click continue for english we have all of this information so let's go ahead and set everything up what we're doing here is we're connecting wordpress to the database that we created so the name of our database is called example underscore db our username is wordpress wordpress username our password is wordpress password and uh no i'm sorry it's example password and example username i got that wrong and our database host is localhost that's fine and you can change the table of prefix to whatever you want let's go ahead and submit this and this looks good all right sparky you've made it through this part of the installation it can communicate with your database let's run the installation and this is where we're going to define our website so what's the title of our website i'm just going to call it tony florida my username for logging into wordpress i'll say is tony florida and this looks like a good password i'll copy that onto my clipboard and my email tony at tony teaches dot tech okay so let's go ahead and install wordpress and just a couple seconds later we're good to go let's log into wordpress username again tony florida password i can paste that from my clipboard click that remember me and log in this is the wordpress admin dashboard this is where you write posts you can come in here and write a post a new blog post and they already have a hello world blog post in there but uh that's fine we'll just say welcome to google cloud platform we did it something like that so we'll publish our first blog post here and that will be available let's view the post here's our first blog post not much there and you know if we go to our home page here this is what that looks like there's a lot of configuration that you can do here as far as the appearance adding some plugins all that stuff i have plenty of other videos on this channel so check some of those out but the one thing i do want to say here is that the i want to talk a little bit more about the pricing so as far as this is concerned if you don't go above one gigabyte per month of transfer out of your server if you don't serve more than one gigabyte of pages then you won't pay a single cent for this website but if you do go above that threshold then you will be charged 12 cents per gigabyte okay i'll make i'll have a whole other video on this topic which you can check out here if you want to go more in depth with that i just want you guys to be aware of that and then also if you want to install an ssl certificate on your wordpress website check out this video here thank you guys for watching i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Tony Teaches Tech

Views: 52,332

Keywords: google cloud wordpress, google cloud hosting wordpress, setup wordpress google cloud, google wordpress cloud, google cloud platform wordpress, google cloud wordpress tutorial, how to host a website on google cloud for free, google cloud free website, host website on google cloud free, how to host website on google cloud for free, free google cloud website, google cloud always free, google cloud free, google cloud free tier, google cloud platform free tier

Id: f56PG7QxjFI

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020