Self-hosting a WordPress blog gives you the ultimate control over your website and database. However, you may want to utilize cloud IaaS or PaaS offerings to provide the lower-level infrastructure (machines, network, or even the webserver). Google provides resources for running WordPress on Google Cloud Platform, but there is very little upfront information about the costs of the different options. GCP’s complex pricing (with Always Free quota and sustained-use discounts), along with some hidden costs in some configurations, made it difficult to predict the final monthly cost.
Knowing the price of hosting a WordPress blog on Google Cloud Platform is important, because small-time bloggers are going to be comparing these options against options that cost less than $5 a month or even nothing (e.g. the WordPress.com personal and free plans, or even jumping blogging platform completely to Medium or similar).
I’ve recently been through the exercise of measuring the costs of running WordPress on GCP with this blog. The summary of the dominant costs is:
| Configuration | Breakdown | Minimum Cost (USD) per month |
|---|---|---|
| App Engine + Cloud SQL ( asia-east2) |
f1-micro App Engine instance ($0) +db-f1-micro MySQL Cloud SQL instance ($11.50) +10GB-months low-cost storage ($1.35) |
$12.35 |
| App Engine + GCE + VPC ( asia-east2) |
f1-micro App Engine instance ($0) +f1-micro GCE instance ($5.42) +2x f1-micro VPC Connector ($10.84) + PD ($1.45) |
$17.71 |
| App Engine + exposed GCE ( asia-east2) |
1 f1-micro App Engine instance ($0) +f1-micro GCE instance ($5.42) +PD ($1.45) |
$6.87 |
| Just GCE ( asia-east2) |
f1-micro GCE instance ($5.42) + PD ($1.45) |
$6.87 |
| free App Engine + free GCE ( us-central1) |
f1-micro App Engine instance ($0) +f1-micro Always Free GCE instance ($0) |
almost $0 |
Caveats:
- $0 prices assume you’re not already consuming your GCP “Always Free” quota.
- There are some additional costs not included in the table (storage and network), but they were < $0.10/month for me.
- I’m not counting Google’s $300 “free trial”, which only lasts 12 months.
Continue reading “Costs of running WordPress using Google Cloud”
